On Tuesday, August 18, 2015, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Generally speaking, isnt that an open problem in computer science? -- Bawolff

Just for the record, this is not a matter for my talk page. I don't encourage using my talk page either to circumvent existing prioritization processes, or to try to resolve deeply complex CS questions. ;) Wikitech (or perhaps Phabricator, depending on the team) is a much more appropriate place than any one individual's talk page to try to adjust department or team-level prioritization, especially when it is someone who isn't even in that department. Luis On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 12:34 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.*

On 08/19/2015 10:17 PM, Jamison Lofthouse wrote: Unfortunately, we can not use reCAPTCHA because it is proprietary software. I agree this is an important issue. It just isn't resourced right now by the WMF, as far as I know. Matt Flaschen

Jamison Lofthouse wrote: I should note that the latest reCAPTCHA¹ is actually *less* friendly. ¹ the “please select all images of foobars” version. I don't think it should be considered as the “best solution” (for wikis where it's suitable to install), nor should we repeat their errors. A small list: 1) It still has user assumptions based on 1a) language: the user must understand what a "foobar" is before he can select those², and they aren't always common use words, precisely. 1b) cultural: will the user easily discover all the photos expected to be coffee if that's not a common beverage on his country? ² no, the sample image³ is not enough to discern what they want. At least with the expected easiness. ³ confusing UI btw, since the naive assumption would be to expect you also had to tick it (which is disabled). 2) confusing images: Sometimes it's not clear what is depicted in the photograph. Not even being a human. 3) wrong images: Sometimes there are images that are not really foobars (suppose they are the similar barfoos), and thus *shouldn't* be marked as such. But according to recaptcha they are. (and your grudgingly selection of the barfoo in order to pass the captcha probably means that Google is performing a wrong training reinforcing their idea that it is indeed a foobar) In terms of difficulty for humans I would score them as: images recaptcha > original reCaptcha > door numbers recaptcha > nocaptcha recaptcha

On 8/25/15, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Well there's that, but its also because its very unclear what "we" actually want and how we would get there. Make captchas not suck, well a great goal, is not an action plan in itself. -- -bawolff

Hey Pine, Responses in-line. On 9 December 2015 at 22:14, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: To the best of my knowledge, nobody is working on the CAPTCHA system right now. The truthful but (presumably) unsatisfying answer is that you'd have to convince someone responsible for planning their team's work that working on the CAPTCHA is more important than what they had planned. That does not seem likely to happen right now. Dan -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Bccing Marti because a lot needs to happen before a CAPTCHA proposal gets under her attention for funding, and anyway decisions are made by the IEG committee of volunteers. Our previous attempts to push CAPTCHA related projects as Possible-Tech-Projects <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/> have failed because of lack of community consensus. Some failures were very bad, wasting significant candidates and mentor time preparing proposals that were discarded as invalid days before the submissions deadlines. If you or someone else wants to help effectively to the progress of captcha projects, the first step is to identify improvements or experiment worth investing for. See for instance Create a CAPTCHA that is also a useful micro edit https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87598 which is Under Discussion at Possible-Tech-Projects. Pine, I bet that if you help getting community consensus for that task (or any other single one you prefer), that would be a more productive use of your time than trying to promote captcha improvements in general. -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil