On 06/19/2015 05:54 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
Earlier this year as a result of the glam organisers
event in Paris I
made a proposal at bugzilla for an event organisers useright. This
would have allowed us to circumvent this problem at those editathons
that are targeted at newbies, and it got widely endorsed by GLAM
editors from several languages. Sadly it got marked as resolved
because there was something that looked similar to developers, though
not of course to potential users. If anyone here knows how to bypass
phabricator or how to mark a phabricator request as unresolved and
still much wanted, then the link is
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91928 alternatively perhaps we
could persuade the education community to endorse it, it should be
just as useful to them and they seem to have more clout with the WMF
than the GLAM community.
I'm sorry that that task was closed (and that there has been no recent
activity on it - excluding today's) but it really is a duplicate and was
asking for functionality which ThrottleOverride extension already has
(with other features). Phabricator tasks generally should ask for one
single feature per task so that it is easy for developers to implement
it. This particular task had lots of requests in it so it's not very
clear. The extension is currently not deployed on Wikimedia wikis
because it lacks some basic functionality like modifying and logging.
You could probably file smaller tasks asking for several features which
would allow the event organizer group to be implemented for real.
As for skipping CAPTCHA, this functionality is already available through
'skipcaptcha' right (which all autoconfirmed users have). If you want to
ask for a new group, you can make a proposal on a local discussions
venue like village pump. This user group (event organizer) would be able
to grant users 'confirmed' group to other users so that the new users do
not have to go through CAPTCHAs while trying to edit. If there is
consensus for it, you can file a task on Phabricator to get the new
group implemented.
As for whether the capcha is useful in keeping out
spammers, remember
there are two capcha steps, one when you open a new account and the
other when you use that to add links. Presumably any spam program
that can pass the first hurdle can pass the second. But for new good
faith human editors each capcha is a possible lost edit/editor.
I also do agree that CAPTCHAs are not very user friendly and is bad for
good faith newbie human editors. I have also sometimes had trouble
solving CAPTCHAs myself on some occassions. However, spambots which are
able to pass in one CAPTCHA test can easily pass the same type of
CAPTCHA again so we can't assume that all accounts which are able to
solve the captcha at registration are not bots. Currently, a non-trivial
amount of time is spent by our wiki administrators and stewards just for
fighting these spambots so we can't just turn CAPTCHAs completely.
It would be good to test dropping the capcha
requirement for adding new
links, alternatively perhaps we could whitelist certain domains as
likely to be reliable sources and unlikely to be spam.
Whitelisting certain links is also currently technically available. See
English Wikipedia's whitelist page for example [1] but this is not
really used probably because many users are not aware of this feature.
It is also possible to exempt certain IP addresses or ranges from
CAPTCHAs but this is only currently doable through server-side config
but I don't remember seeing a request asking an IP to be whitelisted for
an editathon. We could probably allow this whitelist list to also be
also modified on wiki so that event organizers can ask for it without
going through the hassle of asking on Phabricator and getting it
deployed in a timely fashion. I've filed this as a task. [2] I would
also like to suggest that editathon organizers ask for the IPs to be
whitelisted on Phabricator when organizing events.
I think that using these suggestions I mentioned above would help in
this issue during editathons but I'm not sure we've lots of alternatives
for regular edits. We could probably allow all users with a confirmed
email to bypass the captchas. What does others think about this idea?
There is a problem with CAPTCHAs but disabling CAPTCHAs completely is
definitely not the solution, imo.
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Captcha-addurl-whitelist
2.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T103122