On 19/10/11 02:15, Domas Mituzas wrote: > Short answer: no > > Long answer: > > we have uneven chances for different pages to show up. It is based > on the idea that every page gets inserted into discreetly random > position in a certain linear space, so you end up with [[Poisson > distribution]], which from a distance seems to return stuff > randomly enough, but one page can have 1000x higher chance to be > returned than other.
There's no bias towards or away from porn, however. The distributions of page_random gaps are independent of any variable you might want to study, like quality or age. If you try to get a lot of random pages from Special:Random, eventually you will notice that some pages are missing and some pages come up more often. But if you are only fetching a small fraction of the total number of articles, then the statistics of the returned sample will look more or less the same as a true random sample. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
