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:
3. 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