User:Fastfinge

Current Projects

My current projects are trying to get wikipedia to create an accessible captcha so fellow blind users can create accounts and log in, and writing addons for EdSharp [1] to help with editing wikipedia. Other than one summer class, I'm unemployed, healthy, and have time to spend on these things for the next three months.

Captcha Status

This problem has been on-going on and off for something close to two years. Perhaps, with constant attention, we can get it resolved before another year passes. Mediawiki does not seem hostile towards a solution, just indifferent.

4:49 PM on June 10, 2008

The past 5 days have been spent parcially in the real world, as well as researching CAPTCHA coding techniques. The harder I look at creating an audio captcha in PHP, the more I wonder if some kind of text captcha wouldn't be a better bet. Although, that system has some serious problems as well. The main purpose of this update is to include a post made by a blind administrator with more captcha info:

More info on captchas

I'm one of the blind administrators WJBScribe referred to in his message at User talk:Jimbo Wales. I've talk a bit about accessibility here ... I complained when the Main Page was broken in March 2006, did some work at Wikipedia:Accessibility and I respond to accessibility questions when I'm asked to. I'm not generally vocal about things and the captcha wasn't a huge problem for me ... I could always get sighted assistance to help me to get through it.

Captchas were introduced for account creation in late February 2007. I was on a wikibreak at the time and didn't learn about it until I came back. Captchas were introduced after a failed attempt at logging on because of a series of admin account highjackings. These captchas disappear if you load another browser to log in, wait a little while, or even hard refresh the page. I can't remember when capptchas were required for non-autoconfirmed users to add external links, but it was either late 2006 or early 2007.

Captchas are often required for anonymous or non-autoconfirmed users, for things like adding external links and editing at a fast speed, as I discovered during my crazy tests with another account I have, Pianoman87. Captchas are never required for auto-confirmed users, as it says cryptically at Special:ListGroupRights. Note that an autoconfirmed user must now have at least 10 edits.

Some Wikimedia projects are stricter about captchas than others. The Portuguese Wikipedia requires a captcha for any edit at all until you're autoconfirmed, as I found when trying to add an interlanguage link. at least unified login helps somewhat with creating accounts, and means a captcha isn't needed to create an account on every project.

The last time I got someone to read me the captchas on Wikipedia, they were two words put together like "TopCat" or "CupDog". Therefore it might be easier if a free speech synthesizer like Festival or eSpeak was used to read out the captchas. Whatever speech system is used, the audio files must be slightly distorted as captchas for sighted people are quite distorted.

I hope some of this helps. I find that it usually takes six months for even an easy bug to be fixed in MediaWiki like the accessibility bug I filed about the admin interface. Maybe with Jimvo's intervension the captcha issue will be resolved sooner than that. Graham87 14:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

8:59 PM on June 5, 2008

If we do wind up having to create our own audio captcha solution, a high quality database of voice recordings of numbers will be required for any kind of strong captcha. The larger the variety of voices and accents, it seems to me, the stronger the captcha. The first contribution to the database is available: [2].

3:14 PM on June 5, 2008

• Discussion at User talk:Jimbo Wales was begun last night, and is ongoing. The following are the important take-aways:
  • the current request an account procedure applies to blind users and those IP banned for other reasons. It does not seem to require account creators to have the requesting person's IP address or password. (information thanks to: User:jonny-mt and 206.126.88.124)
  • A bug re: accessible captchas was opened several days ago at [3]. However, it has not been assigned or acted on in any significant way thus far. todo: track this bug. (information thanks to: User:jonny-mt)
  • User:Jimbo Wales posted saying he will "raise this issue with Sue Gardner when I am better informed." done: contact Sue Gardner and "Brion" and inquire about this issue. (information thanks to: User:Jimbo Wales)
  • From User:Tim Starling/Weekly reports/2008-W09: "Did some feasibility work into the idea of creating our own open-source audio CAPTCHA. Unfortunately cross-correlation appears to be a powerful and efficient technique for detecting known tagged recordings mixed with noise." This problem will need to be solved, the captcha system will need to be closed source, or a text captcha will need to be used instead. (information thanks to: 89.138.74.123)
  • From [4]: "The only thing stopping us from having an audio captcha is that nobody's put the work into implementing it yet." Todo: look into who can contribute mediawiki code to wikipedia's specs, and see if we can find anyone to do this work. A mediawiki plugin for recaptcha is already available; I'm guessing they don't use it due to license violations or similar. (information thanks to: 89.138.74.123)
  • Many other bugs about this exist, from as far back as 2006. Nothing has yet been solved. They include: [5] [6] and [7]. (information thanks to: 89.138.74.123)
• This section was created in order to keep information about captchas on wikipedia together.

EdSharp Status

3:14 PM on June 5, 2008

• Work on creating citation and footnote Snippets has begun. This could take a while as I need to understand this myself.
• This section has been created to keep track of the work.