Currently users need to solve a captcha every time they insert or edit a weblink in the wiki, unless the website has been added to a small white list of “good” sites by an administrator before.
I’ve easily solved several hundreds of them already and imo they are very annoying when doing small improvements to wiki pages. I don’t see the point to require this for users who have already made more than, say, 10 edits in the wiki. Spammers tend to get kicked out before they manage to reach that number of edits anyway.
And while I don’t know whether oour “bueraucrats” would be willing to do so, MediaWiki itself would afaik make it possible to enable such a policy.
I would recommend to transfer this block into the osm wiki. This would mean that captchas would only be shown for account registration and bad logins which should be enough to fight spam.
I don’t know which way is recommended, but one option is the Talk:Wiki page. Suggestions posted there are sometimes implemented (though not as often as I’d like).
The suggestion had been discussed previously, but the discussion was sidetracked in favour of the whitelist mechanism for urls. Feel free to express your support or add new ideas or suggestions to the discussion.
Curious about whether the Captcha is invoked when adding wikipedia links? I do think that retaining the Captcha for most website additions is OK; should enable the wikimedia shortcut set here.