On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 4:30 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
If the situation is as dire as it sounds, it shouldn't be difficult to find a few resources to throw at the problem. In a discussion like this, examples of particular problematic behavior (links!) are always most helpful to developers, I've found. "This is the bad behavior we're seeing and want to stop. How should we do that?" :-)
I've been advised some of WMF's best are already working on it; however, if you want to see examples you could look at steward Billinghurst's block logs, mostly on non=English wikis.
There are indeed a few of us working to improve the tools that we're using to prevent, detect, and react/recover from spam on WMF wikis. None of our tools are going to be perfect, and that's why we need all approaches.
Preventing spam bots from editing using captchas is just one tool that we're using to prevent spam, so it's not at the top of my list for development projects. But this conversation has been helpful. If there are any ways that we can make captchas easier for legitimate users, prevent more bots, and decrease the amount of spam that AbuseFilter has to catch, then it's a win for us. If there is strong consensus for ways to improve our captchas, then I think we can certainly add it to our list of projects and prioritize it with our available resources (or help find volunteers to implement).