tl;dr: I made Wikipedia:Random even more satisfying. It’s at randomfax.net.

Maybe it’s just the way I select the people I hang around, but it seems to me I know nearly no one who can say they aren’t the target audience for Wikipedia:Random. Personally, I keep my access to it as close as I can. For a while I even had typing facebook.com in the address bar redirect there.

Wikipedia:Random is an amazing phenomenon. While it may turn out rubbish 50% of the time (unverified statistic), it also turns out pure gold, more often than I’d expect. That means, I guess, that the general importance of all the knowledge in the universe only has a partial ordering, and it’s way more dense in the upper echelons than what you think. There is, however, a minute difference.

Wikipedia:Random isn’t Wikipedia.

It’s just not the same thing. People don’t use that as a feature of Wikipedia, they use it recreationally, in a completely different context. It’s a random fact generator, only better informed and better verified.

randomfax.net is a wrapper for Wikipedia:Random. Only it has two things that make me like it better:

• It has a big refresh button, with a pigeon on it.
• Instead of a topic, say “Medulla oblongata”, it would display the title as “What the fuck is a ‘Medulla oblongata’?”. I’m calling that a feature.

That’s kind of the point, I guess. Making Wikipedia:Random as fun as it’s supposed to be. Oh, and it’s indexed by google, which means that I have a lot of weird traffic. But more on that later.

randomfax.net is currently available in Hebrew. Once I get a strong enough server, I’ll make it available in English as well. If anyone wants to help open it in another language (depending on the language, it requires a bit of NLP, but I can help with that), hit me up we’ll make it happen.