On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Per Reisender@online.de wrote:
For example: I would like to learn why it is not possible to use the Mediawiki extension from reCAPTCHA for Wikipedia. This would allow the use of an alternative audio CAPTCHA, but there are surely important arguments against this idea.
Not only is reCAPTCHA closed-source, it also adds a dependency on third-party servers. If their servers go down -- they might not be prepared for the load of a site like Wikipedia -- people presumably won't be able to log in, without expensive and unreliable uptime checks on our part. It adds another point of failure.
Plus it's closed-source, again, which makes it unacceptable by itself.
I would like to search for sponsorship opportunities for such an development project. I don't want the Wikimedia Foundation to pay for anything, but I need interest and supporting words from Mediawiki experts first.
The answer is that if you can find us someone who can improve MediaWiki's accessibility, and who knows what they're doing and is willing to follow our coding standards, etc., it should be no problem to give them commit access. We have at least one person already (Greg Sabino Mullane) who more or less does nothing but maintain a single facet of the software that no one else cares to maintain (PostgreSQL), and has commit access AFAIK solely for that reason.