On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 1:59 AM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
I made some mockups to illustrate some of the ideas on captchas that could be less problematic for non-English speakers, improve the general UX and rely on images from commons.
- Panorama captcha:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama-captcha-idea.png Based on tagging parts of a panorama picture with the appropriate word (in the UI language or Basic English words).
- 'Who is who' captcha:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Find-all-captcha-idea.png Based on finding from a set of similar images the ones that fit a specific criteria (with an image describing also the criteria).
- 'Find the different' captcha:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Find-the-different-captcha-idea.png Based on finding the image that is different from a set of images.
These captchas will probably generate new problems for the technical side, require adjustments to reduce the chance of a machine to solve them, or may just be unfeasible to generate, but I wanted to provide these ideas in case anybody else may use it as a base for improve on any technical weakness they may have and make them at least as hard to solve for a machine as text-based captchas are.
Thanks Pau, that's really helpful. :)
Since we've progressed from just the idea stage to mockups, but we still have a lot of different options, I've started an RfC on MediaWiki.org where we can list all the issues and potential solutions. I don't personally think we need to come to a consensus right now, but CAPTCHAs are going to keep coming up even if no action is taken in the short term, so we should document all our ideas.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/CAPTCHA
Steven