Hello all,
the Wiki is up and running again. We had this purple bog beast infestation in our home, and although our experts were already on the case, we had to devote all our free time to those experts, too, you see...
Okay, jokes aside, I am very sorry for the long downtime. When the captcha extension made trouble I turned the web server off, thinking that I could get to fix that problem soon - which regrettably was not the case. Yesterday I did some upgrades to the underlying operating system and since I started the Web server again, with the Wiki still in its defunct read-only state, hoping that I could run some reparations before announcing "The Wiki is back" to the outside world, I already received an email from llama and even some donations from community members. Those donations will go into the "new HDD for the Wiki" fund, thanks a lot.
(tech talk mode on)
Now that I had a closer look at the situation, the problem was that the Recaptcha extension was being incorporated into the official MediaWiki code, and those updated files have been pulled through SVN updates like they should. The configuration files still linked against the files from the old recaptcha library, though, and those started to fail working correctly at some point. Pretty resistant to any hotfixes. Now that I had enough distance to this, I finally noticed the misconfiguration.
(tech talk mode off)
I will work some more on the underlying Wiki software when I find time for that, but right now you're invited to start using the Wiki in its current form, and please report if you receive any other errors.