[Openstreetmap] making the wiki user-only

[Tom Carden]

ben at somethingmodern.com wrote:
> Tom Carden <tom at tom-carden.co.uk> wrote:
 >>
>>http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/001819.html
> 
> Frankly, its a dumb post. "CAPTCHAs are a pain to users, they trample all over
> good accessibility practice and, most importantly, they're useless as a
> defense against automation"?
> 

To go heavily off-topic, but defend Yoz's post for a bit...

I think that  all those points are valid.  A CAPTCHA really could be 
worse than a log-in, for all the bugmenot reasons and more. 
Accessibility is no joke, especially text size and colour.  The main 
reason your CAPTCHA works is because *you* wrote it, and it's the *only* 
place it's deployed.  If it was standard in a widely deployed package 
like MediaWiki it would be arms-racingly trivial to write a bot to work 
around it, as I'm sure you're aware.

To summarise:

Custom-code simple maths CAPTCHA for the OSM wiki - yes please, rather 
than requiring log-in.

OSM-powered CAPTCHAs - I was kidding, but it's not totally ridiculous if 
you think of it in a (Project Gutenberg style) distributed proof-reading 
way... I'll chalk it up in the "doorways" section for enabling easy 
contribution in the future.

Tom.