On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Luke Welling WMF lwelling@wikimedia.org wrote:
That was not the end of the problem I was referring to. We know our specific captcha is broken at turning away machines. As far as I am aware we do not know how many humans are being turned away by the difficulty of it. It's a safe bet that it is non-zero given the manual account requests we get, but given that we have people to do those kinds of experiments it would make sense to get a number from them before making any drastic decisions based on a reasonable gut feeling. I don't think anybody claims to have a perfect solution to the spam vs usability balancing act, so it's possible we'll try (and measure) a few approaches.
I think the impact on humans will be mensurable once actions which trigger a CAPTCHA are logged: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41522 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/40553/