It’s never been easier to automate bad-faith activity on the internet. On Wikipedia, we deal with bots making inauthentic edits and the risk of scaled campaigns that could disrupt the projects. As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s focus on securing our platform and detecting bad-faith activity , we are building stronger protections against bots carrying out activities that are generally intended for humans, such as creating accounts and editing. Historically, many websites have used a “CAPTCHA” to try to present a puzzle that is doable for humans and hard for computers. As the web has evolved and computers have gotten smarter, these have become both more challenging for humans and easier for computers. We recognize this and are updating our approach to automated abuse on Wikipedia. We began in September 2025, by launching a trial of hCaptcha, third-party bot detection service, to replace our old CAPTCHA .…