On 10/8/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/8/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Captchas aren't limited to pattern matching and speech recognition. When computers catch up to humans enough to make captchas obsolete, it's time to let them write the encyclopedia.
Except the point isn't finding some place where computers are stupider than people, it's finding some place where computers are stupider than people *and other computers can tell the difference*. You could ask the visitor to have a little chat with you, and thirty seconds would tell *you* the difference; but it wouldn't tell your computer anything. Computers can write encyclopedia articles that are perfectly good and high-quality . . . as far as other computers can tell.
Well, maybe I'm wrong. Encyclopedia writing isn't itself a captcha, but I find it hard to believe we're going to be in a place where computers can read anything humans can and yet don't understand language. Humans can easily deal with missing letters and even missing words by using context clues and common sense. Once computers can read and understand language the task of writing an encyclopedia seems within reach. Even if not, the task of automated vandalism-fighting will likely improve enough to make captchas less necessary.
In the not-so-distant future, I think we're going to have to give up on captchas altogether and just rely on some basic throttling, spam blacklists, and human oversight. But we aren't there yet. At the very least, captchas add an extra barrier to spam, for now.
I mostly agree, for some value of "the not-so-distant future". Of course, I also think in the not-so-distant future the kind of contributions made by drive-by editors will be superceded by automated tools, making it much more reasonable to have a thirty-second chat required before editing can take place.