Speaking of anglocentrism, I wonder if it'd be possible for the current captcha software to generate captchas in other languages. I've seen some generated captchas at the Vietnamese Wikipedia that would definitely confuse Vietnamese-speakers (can't remember the words exactly), because of things like r's and n's smooshed up right next to each other and stuff. The user might have to /guess/ because the English words really don't follow Vietnamese spelling rules.
An advantage to localizing the captchas would be that it might reduce the impact of spambots at non-English projects. As far as I know, there isn't yet a captcha-defeating bot that understands Vietnamese or Basque or Quechua.
By the way, I'm only proposing localizing for most languages that use the Latin alphabet, because requiring users to respond to a captcha in Thai or Arabic would exclude a lot of legitimate interwiki users. And users of other scripts tend to have the means of entering in Latin-based characters. Also, for languages that use diacritical marks, we could generate the words without the marks and modify [[MediaWiki:Captcha-createaccount]], asking the user to enter in the word without diacritical marks of any kind.
geni wrote:
On 3/20/06, Theresa Knott theresaknott@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/20/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/20/06, Theresa Knott theresaknott@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry i thought a catchpa was a wiggly word _image_. What I am descirbing could easily be text.
Invent one then ;) Bear in mind that if it's multiple choice, then the robot could just have a few goes.
A colour that's the opposite of black
the number of days in a week
A pet animal that goes woof woof.
That has the problem of being anglocentric.
You are going to need at least 1000 of these and you are going to need them in a lot of languages.
-- geni