Show HN: Random Wikipedia Article by Category | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Random Wikipedia Article by Category

wikistroll.com

12 pointsohgodmarvin5 comments

Definitely a good idea to be able to specify the kind of topic areas that one would be interested in. Also good to restrict it to more "quality" articles. I can see spending a few hours reading articles :)

Anyone know how Wikipedia's own "Random article" function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random) selects articles? Truly completely random with no quality aspect?

Hi, thanks for the feedback! Currently the topics are picked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level... which are all curated articles and most of them should be interesting.

But I am planning to expand by adding more articles that have greater than 10K words. I am using word count as a rudimentary metric to qualify articles initially. But I will probably require something a bit more nuanced eventually if I have to include all of wikipedia's articles.

> Anyone know how Wikipedia's own "Random article" function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random) selects articles? Truly completely random with no quality aspect?

Here's how it works:

- https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/addb6649503c45f0...

TLDR: random, no quality aspect

Thanks for those links! From the code comments: "it won't cause any more bias than what the page_random scheme causes anyway. Trust me, I'm a mathematician. :)" Git blame says the author was "Ilmari Karonen" (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilmari_Karonen), 15 years ago!

Hi HN, I built this mini-project to scratch my own itch. I love wikiroulette but found that it almost always returned articles that were too short/specific. This is not surprising as more than ~78% of the articles on wikipedia are short articles that have less than 10K words.

I am mostly interested in history and could not find a convenient way to get quality articles that are history related and decided to build wikistroll. The articles are based on wikipedia's Level 5 Vital article list[0] and currently contains around 45K articles. Hope you find it useful as well. Any suggestions/feedback welcome.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level...

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