This is an enhancement request related to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects#Multilingual.2C_usable_and_effective_captchas
There has been a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of captchas and the amount of investment we should put on this area. However, the fact is that captchas are deployed in Wikimedia projects, and they are used for combating spam and other misuses on a daily basis. It is also a fact that the current approach (text based) is not optimal for desktop, and clearly problematic for mobile, where reading and typing becomes more difficult. Also, the current model is based in English language / Latin text string, which puts a majority of users in disadvantage.
For all these reasons it is worth investigating a way forward, keeping the current approach of using captchas. (It is also worth considering full alternatives departing from the CAPTCHA techniques, but please discuss them elsewhere)
Any proposal in this direction should comply with these requirements:
* At least as efficient combating spam as the current CAPTCHA method used in Wikimedia projects. Text-based captchas are claimed to be breakable about 25% of the times, according to http://cdn.ly.tl/publications/text-based-captcha-strengths-and-weaknesses.pdf
* A clear solution for sourcing CAPTCHA context automatically from big pools of free text/files. The system proposed cannot rely on manual selection or other types of extra human work.
* Non-discriminatory to users depending on their language.
* Usable in a mobile context.
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**Version**: unspecified
**Severity**: enhancement
**URL**: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
**See Also**:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32695
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5309
https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/issues/89