There is unfortunately a problem with Captcha.
It assumes that the person can read the Roman alphabet.
And many people who can "read the Roman alphabet" will not be able to
recognise letters if they're distorted a bit.
If we only use it on en:, de:, fr:, etc etc, but not uk:, zh:, etc
etc, then I don't really mind.
I don't know if it's possible or reasonable, but a numeric Captcha
would probably work much better as it could be used at all but a few
Wikipedias.
Mark
On 01/07/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
Angela:
The problem is not being ignored. The developers
have already worked
out a way to whitelist certain users, at least for editing if not yet
for account creation. Better solutions and alternative approaches are
being discussed at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proxy_blocking
One thing we discussed on IRC yesterday is to
a) require logging in when editing from an open proxy,
b) require a captcha for every login or account creation from an open proxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
If the captcha is hard to break - I'm told that, for example, Yahoo!'s
is very difficult to break - this should make us relatively secure
against spambot and vandal attacks, as we can deal with a limited supply
of identities.
The most difficult part of the implementation is probably the captcha
itself. The person on IRC who specialized in captchas said that
http://jcaptcha.sourceforge.net/
is a good, free implementation. A problem is that it runs on Java.
I would be strongly opposed to requiring captchas for all logins, even
those which do not come from open proxies, because a visual captcha
would exclude blind people from accessing Wikipedia.
I'd be happy to put further evaluation of this issue on the agenda for
the next research meeting. However, Tim might be more willing to work on
something in his free time if there's not yet a full-fledged proposal
out there. So I'd like to ask Tim to comment first on whether he wants
to work on a solution to the problem, not necessarily the one outlined
above.
Best,
Erik
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