Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
For choosing an article, it would be better to just pick a new random number.
Although there are probably more efficient ways to pick a random record out of a database. For example, by periodically reindexing, or by sorting extant records by random (if supported by the database).
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Marching up to the next non-empty key would skew the distribution—pages preceded by more empty keys would show up more often under “random”.
Fun fact, that concept is used in computer security exploits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_slide
For choosing an article, it would be better to just pick a new random number.
Although there are probably more efficient ways to pick a random record out of a database. For example, by periodically reindexing, or by sorting extant records by random (if supported by the database).