Someone needs to run this:
UPDATE cur SET cur_random=RAND()
Here's a quote from Village Pump explaining why:
The pseudorandom number generator which backs the Special:Randompage link
appears to be not so good. I just hit it about two dozen times and had
several links come up multiple times. -º¡º
Emphasis on pseudo. I got RNA transcription four times in about a dozen
clicks - twice in succession. Also, Zog's favorite song came up - but
redirected to Johnny Rebel. I thought redirects were excluded. Geoffrey
Here's what I found out with a few SQL queries. The cur_random field values
are strongly clustered up around the high end. In fact, there are no
articles at all between about 0.18 and 0.4, and only few below 0.18. A few
minutes of browsing through the old versions of SpecialRandompage.php shows
why. A previous version of the software selected the lowest-numbered
cur_random value, and set it to a random value. So here's why we now see
poor results: Most of the pages are clustered up above 0.9 or so, so when
you click Special:Randompage , there's a high chance of picking one of the
few low-numbered articles. The cur_random value is then reset, and there's
still a high chance of the new value being below 0.9. Hence, the few
priveleged low-numbered articles get selected far more often, and unless
someone re-randomizes cur_random column, it take a long time for the
high-numbered articles to diffuse back down. -- Tim Starling 04:25 May 1,
2003 (UTC)
--END QUOTE--
-- Tim Starling.
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail now available on Australian mobile phones. Go to
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/hotmail_mobile.asp
UPDATE cur SET cur_random=RAND()
Here's a quote from Village Pump explaining why:
The pseudorandom number generator which backs the Special:Randompage link
appears to be not so good. I just hit it about two dozen times and had
several links come up multiple times. -º¡º
Emphasis on pseudo. I got RNA transcription four times in about a dozen
clicks - twice in succession. Also, Zog's favorite song came up - but
redirected to Johnny Rebel. I thought redirects were excluded. Geoffrey
Here's what I found out with a few SQL queries. The cur_random field values
are strongly clustered up around the high end. In fact, there are no
articles at all between about 0.18 and 0.4, and only few below 0.18. A few
minutes of browsing through the old versions of SpecialRandompage.php shows
why. A previous version of the software selected the lowest-numbered
cur_random value, and set it to a random value. So here's why we now see
poor results: Most of the pages are clustered up above 0.9 or so, so when
you click Special:Randompage , there's a high chance of picking one of the
few low-numbered articles. The cur_random value is then reset, and there's
still a high chance of the new value being below 0.9. Hence, the few
priveleged low-numbered articles get selected far more often, and unless
someone re-randomizes cur_random column, it take a long time for the
high-numbered articles to diffuse back down. -- Tim Starling 04:25 May 1,
2003 (UTC)
--END QUOTE--
-- Tim Starling.
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail now available on Australian mobile phones. Go to
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/hotmail_mobile.asp