On 10/04/2008, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Per Reisender@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.
If reCAPTCHA were free software - or if someone duplicated its functionality in free software - and it were running on a Wikimedia server, would it (or something like it) be something we'd likely run? Given its usefulness to the world of getting public domain stuff from image to text form.
- d.