The Swedish Wikipedia now has more than 1.5 million
articles, compared to 600,000 in January 2013 and
500,000 in September 2012. This is due to the creation
by a bot of many articles on animal and plant species.
The Swedish Wikipedia community has discussed the
matter thoroughly, and there is strong consensus to
keep these articles and to keep on generating more.
(It is known that many German wikipedians think these
are bad articles that should be removed, but this is not
their decision.)
The current implementation of [[Special:Random]],
however, gives equal weight to every existing article and
this is perceived as a problem that needs to be fixed.
But it is not obvious how a bug report or feature
request should be written. A naive approach would be
to ask for a random article that wasn't created by a
bot, but this is not to the point. Users want bot
generated articles to come up, only not so often. And
some manually written article stubs are also less wanted.
Perhaps the random function should be weighted by
article length or by the number of page views? But is
it practical to implement such a weighted random
function? Are the necessary data in the database?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se