On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 12:51 AM 3/30/03 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 23:52, Anthere wrote:
- Could it be possible that the "random page" be (per
option) chosen with a size threashold ? This would be to avoid all these pages about dates and french little villages that keep on appearing on random pages :-).
Hehe... Traditionally people asked for that to keep out the city pages on the English wiki, which wouldn't help at all since those pages are at or _above_ the median article size...
While on the subject of the "random page" link, why is it that the page it takes me to is apparently not very random? Sometimes when I've got nothing specific to do I'll just start clicking random page repeatedly searching for an interesting article to tinker with, and I find that I start visiting the same small set of pages over and over again. Also, it seems that an unusually large number of these random pages are ones which have been just recently edited, though I haven't done a rigorous count of this. Is there some sort of non-random algorithm being used?
If I remember correctly, there are 1000 pages being selected once a day or so, which are then cycled through. So once you get a significant portion of this 1000 pages, you would indeed often be getting the same pages again.
The second thing is similar - if you see something on random page, it is like others have seen it in the same way as well. Pages that are on random page are thus more visited, and therefore more edited, in the last day.
Andre Engels