On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Per <Reisender(a)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.