Dear all,

A CAPTCHA system for all anonymous users was activated at the Portuguese Wikipedia in January 2008 to fight off some bot attacks we were facing [1]. The system remained in place since then, even after the bot attacks went away, requiring that every single edit made by anonymous and not autoconfirmed users pass through this system.

We have opened now a discussion [2] to see if it is possible to remove the system without overburdening our vandal fighters with a massive ammount of anonymous vandalism, but to argue one way or the other we are currently lacking strong evidence that i) the ammount of anonymous vandalism changed significantly after the implementation of the CAPTCHA system; and ii) the CAPTCHA system is making it difficult for people to contribute anonymously; and also we need a process to detect, if we decide to test how things would go without the CAPTCHA, changes in the ammount of vandalism occoring at ptwiki.

I would appreciate any comments/suggestions/ assistance on these issues.

User:GoEThe

[1] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/Arquivo/2008/Janeiro#A... [2] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/propostas/Remo%C3%A7%C... Dear all,

A CAPTCHA system for all anonymous users was activated at the Portuguese Wikipedia in January 2008 to fight off some bot attacks we were facing [1]. The system remained in place since then, even after the bot attacks went away, requiring that every single edit made by anonymous and not autoconfirmed users pass through this system.

We have opened now a discussion [2] to see if it is possible to remove the system without overburdening our vandal fighters with a massive ammount of anonymous vandalism, but to argue one way or the other we are currently lacking strong evidence that i) the ammount of anonymous vandalism changed significantly after the implementation of the CAPTCHA system; and ii) the CAPTCHA system is making it difficult for people to contribute anonymously; and also we need a process to detect, if we decide to test how things would go without the CAPTCHA, changes in the ammount of vandalism occoring at ptwiki.

I would appreciate any comments/suggestions/assistance on these issues.

User:GoEThe

[1] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/Arquivo/2008/Janeiro#A... [2] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/propostas/Remo%C3%A7%C...