User talk:Rambot/Random page

See also User talk:Rambot/Delete

Perhaps we could flag and pipe minimalist American geography articles. They are hardly interesting to anyone and they certainly discourage the random pages use as an editing tool. It's not just a substitute for opening a Volume at random by the reader: for the editor it churns articles to the top of the to do list. if tagging were made available, random change junkies would have the rambot stubs filtered out in no time. Anytime it was filled out to the point of interst of a random user, the flag could be lowered. If someone forgot, or didn't know about it, there is no problem 'cause the next time a Wikipedian accessed that page they could lower the flag. User:Two16

I don't quite understand the obsession some people have with hiding one particular category of articles that could desperately use some research and human addition. --Brion 06:43 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, you are ignoring some very important things:

1. Many of us are not American. There is a world outside of the USA, you know. And if someone from, say, Australia, sees a so-called "article" (with almost no non-numeric content) about some obscure township somewhere in the middle of the USA, what's he supposed to do about it? You're just wasting his time! Even if he's not looking to edit articles, but is only interested in browsing... my gosh! it's like reading the telephone directory!
2. Same goes for most of the Americans here. Let's say there are forty thousand towns in the USA. That is just a guess. And let us say that each of us Americans is familiar with forty of those towns, which is probably greater than the truth (but what do I know?). So even an American would have only a 1 in 1000 chance of being able to edit an article about a town. And after a while, seeing all those town articles is a total BORE. Don't you just want to turn them the heck OFF?
3. I am not sure whether or not I correctly understand the difference between "information" and "data", but it seems to me that these articles are pure data with little or no information. If data is what you want, I hope somebody uploads a star catalog! \(`o')/
4. I think I get your point, Brion. What you are trying to say is that you want "random page" to show the town articles just to remind people that they are there. If that's you want, then have "random page" use this procedure: Choose a random number from 0 to 7. If it is 0, show a town article. If it is 1 through 7, choose another article. You could, if you wanted, be sly and try to bias the distribution of town articles towards the user's home state (if you can tell where they're accessing the Internet from, what their time zone setting is, etc.) But really, once you've edited articles for your town and the surrounding towns, and possibly other towns you're familiar with, what more is there to do, other than crib information from books, the Internet, etc.?

If you ask for a "Random page", by gum you'll get a random page. If you don't like it, push the freaking button again and see if the next one interests you. This goes equally for American towns, Canadian towns, Russian towns, African towns, Australian towns, South American towns, Chinese towns, Antarctic towns, tiny islands in the Pacific, craters on the moon, characters in the Simpsons, obscure politications and writers, films that won some award a hundred years ago, and the number of pimples on a long-dead feudal ruler's butt. I hope this sums up my opinion on the matter. --Brion 20:31 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I hope adding a comment at what is now the middle of the article isn't too bad a breach of etiquette (although I'd have thought shouting might equally be :-D), but I would like to pick a hole in the above argument: "This goes equally for American towns... Russian towns... craters on the moon..." That would be fine if it were true, but since nothing has yet been added on quite the scale of US towns, the chances of getting a US town are much greater than those of getting a Russian one - in other words, the random page is unfairly biased towards US towns at the moment. It's like you've made one of the sides of a dice bigger somehow, and are continuing to throw it as though it was fair; of course, once a few more lists are added en masse (assuming the rambot entries aren't instead deleted) the other sides of the dice will grow too, so it will be fair. Until then it would be useful to have a feature that artificially weighted the dice back the other way - i.e. deliberately under-represented rambot articles to be fair to non-rambot ones. I don't know if this will make a difference to anyone's opinions on anything, but it's what I think. - IMSoP 00:04, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Contents

1 Random Pages 2 "Random page" returns georgraphic and biographical entries too often 3 proposal: a purely statistical solution to Random Page 4 As of 2005...

Random Pages

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Saturday, September 13th, 02003.

• Half the time I use the Random Page button I get a rambot entry. There must be about 75,000 of them. DJ Clayworth.
• Only 30,000 IIRC. See User:Rambot. Angela
• Maybe a developer could stop these appearing the random page feature. Cyan.
• Does a village of 100 people need an article? Adam Bishop
• Put it on VfD. It's stupid. dave
• They should be here but they pose the appearance of gratuitously inflating the article count. Ted Clayton
• They are an example of what What Wikipedia is not ? "mere collections of public domain or other source material". http://www.wikiatlas.org would be better suited for this. dave
• But we are encouraged to make use of public and open sources. Ted Clayton
• Maybe Wiki shouldn't duplicate. Could they go to a subproject? DJ Clayworth
• Wikipedia materials need not be original or unique. Ted Clayton
• The random page feature shouldn't be tweaked; it should stay random. The articles, should be removed. dave
• The auto-addition of the town articles was probably not a good idea, but now that they're there? and some towns are more significant than they appear. Stan
• It is not necessary to prove that a town has no significance before you can delete. dave
• Maybe later we can update our software so that users can set their own range of "Random" -wshun
• We could make the "Skip Rambot-added articles" feature an option. Cyan.
• May warrant a distinct wiki. Ted Clayton
• Robots raise many issues; grow faster than the software and hardware can support. They might make it boring and dull. Ted Clayton
• Stupid to create 30000 of them with no introduction. They're stubs. dave
• We don't delete stubs by policy. All these entries ar correctly entered etc. They are good information. Wiki is not paper. Morven
• They are stubs so are a recognized work/problem/policy pile. Ted Clayton
• This really is a stub issue and that's how it should be handled. Ram-Man should make a robot to go and add his pages to the stub page. dave
• I got 1 of them in 10 random pages. RTC
• Wikipedia is slow. Marshman
• They do not affect anyone's use or enjoyment of Wikipedia. We need an 'interest filter': Ted Clayton
• I got 3 out of 10 and a couple of stubs. RTC
• They're not uselss. Would it also be simple to set a Length value for Random Page? Ted Clayton
• Perhaps we should exclude stubs from the random queue. CGS
• No, one of Random Page's most useful aspects is that you can find stubs. Jwrosenzweig

Good job Angela, this shortened version is great. I love the old comments like "Put it on VfD. It's stupid." and "Ram-Man should make a robot to go and add his pages to the stub page." They didn't seem as funny before when they were wordy. LOL. dave 02:47, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It is, of course, only my interpretation of what people said which is why I've delinked the names. Feel free to change if I have misrepresented anyone. Angela 03:01, Sep 12, 2003 (UTC)

I used to use the Random Page button as a good way of finding an interesting article that I never knew about before. Recently I've been finding that about 50% of the time I get one of those pages about a tiny US town; you know the ones, all identically formatted and giving the same statistics. These pages should be on Wikipedia, but is there a way of getting them removed from the random page generator? Presumably there must be about 75,000 if them if I'm getting them this often. DJ Clayworth 15:26, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Only 30,000 IIRC. See User:Rambot for more info. I don't know if it's possible to remove them from the random page generator though. Angela 15:36, Sep 11, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think it would be too hard to have Random Page ignore articles for which Rambot is the last editor. Maybe a developer could look into that. -- Cyan 17:35, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I get that too, sometimes 10 or 12 in a row...why should they be on there, though? Does a village of 100 people need an article? Adam Bishop 15:39, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

No kidding. Find a few small towns, like ones with less than 1000 people, and put a Votes for Deletion notice. See what happens. I think that would create an interesting debate about the usefulness of those articles. That is the great thing about Wikipedia, that articles get created by real people when they want to create one. Having a robot make 30,000 articles about US towns is stupid. Look at La_Crosse, Florida, population 143. Useful information in that article: none. There are 62 households in that town!!! Jesus, if we want to take it another step, I could take my home town, Richmond, British Columbia pop. >150,000 and divide it into sub areas: Brighouse, Broadmoor, Steveston, East Richmond, West Richmond, Cambie, etc... Anyways, I always noticed how lots of US towns came up after pressing the random page button...I just never actually LOOKED closely at the articles themselves before. So many towns are "rinky-dink" and there is no useful information on the page (for example if you wanted to travel to that town). dave 15:56, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, they should be here alright ... this and other high-page-count data-sets that are available and easily installed in the Wikipedia. They may be yawners, but they belong. But they do detract from Random Page, which is otherwise a neat feature. Another issue with such pages is they can pose the appearance of gratuitously inflating the article count. At least recognize that Random Page is worthwhile (and popular), but needs help, and keep that need on the list going forward? -- Ted Clayton 16:09, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"this and other high-page-count data-sets" belong here? I beg to differ and I think Wikipedia policy might as well. See Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not...one thing it is not is "Mere collections of public domain or other source material". IMHO, the articles of 30,000 US could be described as a mere collection of source material. The thing is, if we allow robots to add high-page-count data-sets such as this, where does it end? Should all towns in the world with population of over 1 be added to Wikipedia. I think http://www.wikiatlas.org would be better suited for this. dave 17:20, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, yes, the spec offers this sanction. But the leaders also post a prominent page full of public domain and other sources, and instruct us on how to go about converting them to Wikipedia content. It is obvious that we are encouraged - and are explicitely within our rights - to make use of public and open sources. -- Ted Clayton 17:59, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Two questions. First, is the information from these articles available on another site in the same form; if so then maybe Wiki shouldn't duplicate. Alternatively could these all be filed to a subproject? DJ Clayworth 16:25, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

see my reply to Ted above. dave

Wikipedia materials need not be original or unique; those are not requirements. Although we should try to write appealing pieces, try to make the place cool, this is a collection of information that already exists. Some articles are created fresh by editor/authors, but others contain information copied - legitimately - from many sources. It's ok that information gathered here is available elsewhere too. -- Ted Clayton 17:59, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I don't really think the random page feature should be tweaked, nor do I think it should remove US cities from it's possible list of choices. If it is called random it should stay random. If people don't like the disproportionate number of US town articles, then they should be removed. dave 17:20, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The auto-addition of the town articles was probably not a good idea, but now that they're there, it's an amusing game (to diehard Wikipedians anyway) to add more about these towns. Many of them are the birthplaces or residences of people with articles already, or the town has a historical significance. Also, some towns are more important than the population figures suggest; Prudhoe Bay, Alaska for instance. The only towns for which deletion might be justified are the ones with no provable significance, which means you have to research them anyway just to find that out. Stan 17:29, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I agree on some things. But I do not think it is necessary to prove that a town has no significance before you can delete it's article. dave 17:37, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Maybe later we can update our software so that users can set their own range of "Random" -wshun 17:38, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

We could make the "Skip Rambot-added articles" feature an option in Preferences. That would make everybody happy... (or do I speak to soon?) -- Cyan 17:43, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

In the case of some large, well-defined data sets, such as the Dictionary, separate wikis have been made, pulling that stuff out of the main wiki. Town information is part of GIS, Geographical Information Systems, the modern form of traditional cartography and mapping. Ultimately, such material would be a fabulous addition to the Wikipedia, and indeed would include street and house and fire hydrant information for Richmond, BC and Tuktoyuktuk, NWT (or is it Nunavut?). Such a development may well warrant a distinct wiki. -- Ted Clayton 17:55, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Robots and other forms of automated content addition raise many issues. They might make Wikipedia grow faster than the software and hardware can support. They might make it boring and dull. But this is the age of computers, and grappling with the issues the tools introduce, rather than just chucking the tool because there are issues, leaves us in a position to use powerful means to really move the project forward dramatically. In the big picture. -- Ted Clayton 18:10, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I agree. It would be nice if the Rambot had of added the demographics to all US towns which already had a Wikipedia article for it. However, to create 30,000 articles, some of them useless little towns (I don't think some of the residents would even mind that comment) was a bit much. It's just stupid to have article with a demographics section and no proper introduction or any other important information! It's like a stub. dave 18:21, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it's like a stub. But we don't delete stubs by policy, either. Another point is that adding all these entries gets them CORRECTLY entered into the database, spelled right, and gets some critical factual information into them that might otherwise never get added. Overall, I just don't get the mindset on here that's constantly going round wanting to delete good information from the system just because it's 'not interesting enough'. Wiki is not paper, and all that. Nothing is being pushed out. --Morven 22:25, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Good point, Dave: these impoverished entries are just like stubs. I see a lot of guide-pages on the stub issue, going 'round & 'round. We wanna do stubs, to frame things out, but they're disappointing when ya follow a link and it's nothing but a scrap. If we look at the existing town entries as a stub-issue, that puts it in a recognized work/problem/policy pile, eh? -- Ted Clayton 18:40, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Yes, thanks you've really helped me realize that this really is a stub issue and that's how it should be handled. Putting all of these on the stub alert page might bring attention to them there. Part of me feels that Rambot (aka Ram-man) is responsible, so Ram-man should make a robot to go and add his pages to the stub page. Or, that he should maintain a list of all town pages which are currently stubs. But who is motivated enough to change all these stubs into something less stubly? Not me. If the robot is smart enough (or dumb enough :-)) to create these pages in the first place, then it should be smart enough to delete them all, and then to append the demographic information at a later date for new city pages that get created. This is what I would do in my ideal world. dave 22:59, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, for what it is worth I just clicked Random Page 10 times in a row and got exactly one Rambot created page: Martin, Georgia, on the 8th click. Not worth much, but an observation. -- RTC 18:14, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

You were lucky. I could not get to number two before the Server refused to give up a page. It is bad enough that editing is becoming serriously problematic on Wikipedia, but would anyone use this as an information source if links regularly yield "page unavailable due to DNS error". Please fix - Marshman 18:53, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Please see & participate in, Wikipedia Really Slow, on this Village Pump page. -- Ted Clayton 19:15, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

We agree Random Page is nifty. But if there is a substantial load of 'boring' entries, those aren't what we're after. Ordinarily, a feeble entry for Queets WA USA isn't an issue, because you'll never kick it up (unless maybe you're planning to drive Highway 101 on the Olympic Peninsula. Or paddle the Northwest Passage, and pull into Tuktoyuktuk NWT CA. Usually, such seemingly boring places (and I have it from impeccable sources that both those no-count towns can deliver life-changing experiences ;) do not affect anyone's use or enjoyment of Wikipedia.

We already have efforts to install large numbers of people-names, and large numbers of dates back into history. Other large sets are coming, especially after the delivery platform gets beefed. These are additional examples of sets that Random Page will 'dredge up'. Yet they're valuable. It appears that what many of us really want in Random Page is an 'interest filter': it should return things that will interest ... me! Gimme a cookie to save my preferences! :) -- Ted Clayton 19:15, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

One more set of useless tests: on another 10 clicks of Random Page I got 2 town or city and 1 county entrys by Rambot (the County entry has a map ans some external links): Alta Vista, Kansas (1st click), Cuba (town), New York (4th click), Phillips County, Montana (7th click). I also hit a couple of single sentence stub entries on other subjects (neither of which had stub notices). -- RTC 21:00, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Humble, yes, useless, no. Homely tests resemble bot-stubs: they ain't flashy, but they're solid contributions anyway. Cyan made a practical suggestion; tweak Preferences to filter RamBot entries: this is easy, eh? Cyan, would it also be simple to set a Length value for Random Page? -- Ted Clayton 21:24, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we should exclude links that are shown in purple (it's an option for showing stub articles) from the random queue. CGS 22:23, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC).

CGS, I have to respectfully disagree. One of Random Page's most useful aspects is that it allows an editor to fall fortuitously into a stub which might otherwise lie undisturbed for the next several Presidential administrations. If given the choice, I'd actually rather randomly jump _only_ to stubs: after all, randomly arriving at a decent article rarely gives pause, but randomly finding a stub one can fix is a pleasure. Just my two cents...Jwrosenzweig 22:38, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Nevertheless, I am a bit concerned about the Rambot inclusions of townships down to 20 inhabitants in a general encyclopedia as Wikipedia purports to be. It is probably just as well that our non-en:Wiki friends are not using similar compilations, otherwise the number of townships would run into the millions? :)

Dieter Simon 00:25, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

See also: list of places with fewer than ten people

---

So whats the final solution like ? Will the random page feature be tweaked or not to minimize rambot hits ? Jay 14:57, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Given that only about 1 in 7 pages are Rambot anyway nowadays, and this proportion is continually falling, I think this would be a very low priority on the developers todo list and don't expect it to happen. Just hit the random button again until you are happy. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:07, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"Random page" returns georgraphic and biographical entries too often

Pages retrieved by the "Random page" link seem disproportionately dominated by geographic and biographical entries. In one sample of 50 "random pages", 18 geographic entries and 7 biographical entries were returned. Entries of these types are more appropriate as reference material than for casual browsing.

Please consider changing the "random page" function to provide selectable broad categories so that readers who are less interested in geographic reference information can avoid those pages?

You are incorrect; it is entirely proportional. We have a lot of such pages. --Brion VIBBER 21:42, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Incorrect yes but I agree with this person that the usefulness of the random page feature is reduced by too many geographical entries. Maybe a solution would be to add a user-defined keyword list filter for the random page returned. If it existed, "NOT geography AND NOT demographics" would do the trick. I think that repeated random page request until something interesting shows up(read not geographical entry) is a pretty common practice. Maybe the cost saved in processing and bandwidth for not returning user discarded geographical results could balance what would be needed in processing to search a page before it is returned.

But wait, I have an idea. In the mean time, one can use google with -geography -demographics site:en.wikipedia.org to get something similar to this. Although, a small pain is that the the results are ranked not randomized.

proposal: a purely statistical solution to Random Page

It seems to me there are several reasons for using the random page feature:

• boredom -- looking for an interesting tidbit in wikipedia
• boredom -- looking for an unintersting page in wikipedia to update
• boredom -- looking for a page that could use some proofreading or other help

As such, it would be nice if you could ask random page for the exact kind of page you want. I propose that features be added to allow either user preferences or some kind of bookmarkable form or something be used to give parameters to random page.

Useful parameters would be something like

• minimum (maximum) page size threshold
• minimum (maximum) number of edits a page has had

Between the two of these options, you should be able to easily either filter out or select for robot generated pages that need work or are boring or whatever.

Is this something easy to implement? Would people use this? Comments?

  --ssd 22:09, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's an interesting thought, but my immediate response is that the effort required to implement it would probably rather outweigh the gain, since just clicking the random page button multiple times would achieve the same end. (One trick I've sometimes used is to use Mozilla's tabbed browsing abilities and middle-click the link multiple times, giving me a different random page in each of a set of tabs...) - IMSoP 12:55, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I doubt it would take that much effort to implement. In fact one possible implementation would be to pick the random page, check against criteria, and repick if it fails. (For safety, I'd probably have it only try 3-4 times before it just returns what it finds without checking.) Something like Special:Randompage/minsize=1000/minedits=10 --ssd 15:39, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

This would certainly be easy enough for the size - after all, there's already an option for colouring "stub" links differently, so there must be a fairly efficient way of checking this. I'm not so sure about the number of edits bit though - I can't think of anywhere in the current software where that's calculated, and I don't know enough about the database structure to know if it would require a prohibitively expensive query.

Thinking about it, though, it shouldn't be necessary to use a pick-check-repick system - from what little I know about SQL, the criteria ought to be includable as WHERE clauses. - IMSoP 16:00, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

As of 2005...

As of 2005, there are enough articles in the Wiki that hitting "Random Page" usually doesn't put me on one of Rambot's page. Either that, or they have tweaked the mediawiki software to give less weight to rambot pages when hitting 'random page". Samboy 09:13, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)