On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Oona Castro ocastro@wikimedia.org wrote:
For now, it's worth mentioning the Portuguese Wikipedia community has been working on this antivandalism project http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia_Discuss%C3%A3o:Projetos/AntiVand... order to build alternative measures to deal with vandalism and inappropriate edits with a very small portion of the community reverting edits - considering the short and mid terms.
They are already aware that even the return of emergency CAPTCHA won't be a definite measure (lasting no more than one year, as per what was agreed)
As much as I dislike captchas, this seems like a considered decision by the Portuguese Wikipedians. We should support local wiki communities in making choices for themselves -- and help them to run short-term experiments, evaluate the results, and correct mistakes.
Letting communities make and learn form their own mistakes is more important than always being 'right' for one definition of rightness: we can learn from many independent communities, each with their own standards. Of course we all want to improve editor engagement + retention, and overall quality + coverage - the pt:wp community does too! The question is how to trade off between these.
One requirement for making a controversial configuration change - or for continuing it beyond a short initial test period - might be the ability of the requesting community to evaluate its effect.
Sam.