2012/1/6 Platonides platonides@gmail.com:
Integrating this into ConfirmEdit extension shouldn't be hard. It's the extra features what makes this tricky. This system is interesting for gathering translations, but doesn't work for verifying that the answer is right. How would you verify that? The approach that comes to my mkind is to show both the current captcha plus another, optional, captcha, with a note about how filling that second captcha helps wikisource, and that the answer will be logged with their username/ip.
ReCAPTCHA already works in a way similar to this. Two words are presented but only one is known and actually serves to filtrate accesses. They then collect answers for both words and if the test on the first is passed (which indicates a human) then the answer for the second is recorded. When a certain number of people agree on the transcription of a previously unknown word then that transcription is taken as good and used in future as a filter word. We could say that we accept a transcription as "valid" after N people agrees on a given word and put back on Wikisource only the validated words (and also use them as filters, too) . This seems both a reliable and easy-to-implement system to me.
Anyway, at the beginning we could use the system you describe using the current captcha and words from books.
I believe the trickiest part is creating a system to put results back in Wikisource in a semi-automated way, but having "captcha reviewers" may help.
We could also decorate our captcha with "this captcha helps transcribing <BOOK TITLE> + link".
And this leads me to what I think is the real point: once we have a basically-working system we can think to whatever useful feature and implement it, in principle we can have a modular system which can be refined /at libitum/.
Cristian