[WikiEN-l] Captcha word quiz

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/20/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Theresa Knott wrote:
> >
> > Take the second letter of ADAM, the first letter of  OGRE and the last
> > of RAINING.
>  >
>  > Is it possible for a bot to get around that?
>
> In a word, yes.  Unless you want to try coming up with new and
> interesting variations faster than the bots can be taught to parse them.

And I bet if you give that captcha to enough humans, enough will fail
for things to get very tense very quickly. "What do you mean take the
second letter? What do I do with it? I just want to help with
wikibooks!!!"

Mind you, graphical captchas can get beaten too, unless they're done
very carefully.

Perhaps if linkspam is the problem, we should just implement severe
restrictions on including URLs? It's hard to imagine many situations
where a new editor with almost no editors is adding a really useful
URL that complies with [[WP:External links]]. And is there a reason
Wikipedia doesn't use Google's suggested "nofollow" tag?

Steve