It really doesn't matter, but why in the world would you do random page selection like that? Maybe that makes it super-easy from a SQL standpoint? But as demons

It really doesn't matter, but why in the world would you do random page selection like that? Maybe that makes it super-easy from a SQL standpoint? But as demonstrated it does a terrible job of weighting pages evenly, when a tiny bit of code could make them completely equally likely. And further, there's good arguments that they shouldn't be equally likely. Instead, rank articles by size, or popularity, so people are more likely to see articles that are reasonably interesting and full of content.