Yesterday I have held lectures about Wikipedia at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Applied Studies in Belgrade [http://www.viser.edu.rs/?lang=EN] and observed them trying to create a new user and save an article. Since all the students used the same IP, they have all triggered captchas, so here are my general remarks. Note that these students should be more computer literate than most students of their age (early 20s).
Some students have found the captchas to be difficult to read - for example some could not differ 'a' from 'x' or 'r' from 'y' - so perhaps captchas should not be made even more difficult. Captcha localization could help here.
The warning that the article is not saved is not clearly visible, and some students have managed to not save their articles without realizing that they have not saved them. The warning could be made more visible, but I believe that the best way of solving this would be to try to save the article by ajax, and to display the captcha on the article editing page itself.
Account creation is botched in several ways, and these are really beginners' errors for which I don't understand how could they happen in age-old software as MediaWiki. Examples:
- If you enter a mismatched password, the error message will only appear after you click on 'Create your account'. The mismatch could be checked in the javascript after entering the passwords on the page itself, the same way duplicate username is checked.
- If you enter the passwords right but the captcha wrong, you have to reenter the passwords. Basically, whatever mistake you make, you have to reenter the passwords. I see no reason to do this, the password fields could be pre-filled with the entered passwords. Also, similar to article saving above, it would be even better if the captcha would be verified via ajax on the page itself.
- The opposite: if you enter a password wrong but the captcha right, you have to reenter the passwords (good) AND reenter the captcha (bad). Some quick typers have oscillated several times between entering one or the other wrong. I see no need to have to reenter the captcha once you have entered it correctly - you have already authenticated as a human.
Also, if I may ask for a wish, a special page where I could enter an IP and free it of all the spam filters and protections would be nice and all the wikieducators would thank you :)