Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that is linked more than 695,000 times throughout the online encyclopedia.
Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that is inaccessible behind paywalls. Therefore, it is also useful as a Wikipedia citation source.
However, according to Wikipedia's discussion page on the topic, “it has been agreed that archive.today will be retired immediately and added to the spam blacklist as soon as possible.” […] and immediately remove all links thereto. ” (The decision was first reported by Ars Technica.)
The discussion page states that Archive.today was blacklisted in 2013, but was removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why reverse course again? That's because the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not direct readers to websites that take over users' computers and perform DDoS attacks.” Additionally, “evidence has been presented that the operators of archive.today have altered the content of archived pages, rendering them unreliable.”
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokario. Patocario wrote that since January 11th, users who loaded the archive's CAPTCHA page were unwittingly loading and running JavaScript that sent search requests to his Gyrovague blog in an apparent attempt to get Patocario's attention and increase his hosting fees.
Back in 2023, Patocario published a blog post investigating Archive.today, describing its ownership as an “opaque mystery.” And although they were unable to pinpoint a specific owner, they concluded that the site was likely “a one-man labor of love, run by a Russian with great talent and access to Europe.”
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Recently, Patocario said Archive.today's webmaster asked him to stop posting for two to three months.
According to an email shared by Patocario, the webmaster said, “I don't care about that post, but the problem is that journalists from mainstream media outlets (Heise, Verge, etc.) are taking just a few words from your blog, using your post as the only citable source to construct a completely different narrative, and quoting each other to produce shitty results to present to a wide audience.”
Patocario said that after refusing to remove the post, the webmaster responded with an “increasingly open-ended series of threats.”
Wikipedia editors also noted that a snapshot of the web page on Archive.today appeared to have been altered to include Patocario's name, which they feared makes it “less reliable” as an archive.
Wikipedia's guidance currently requires editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites and replace them with links to the original source or other archives, such as the Wayback Machine.
In a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the person who appears to be the site's owner writes that Archive.today's value to Wikipedia is “not about paywalls,” but rather “its ability to alleviate copyright issues.” They later wrote that things went “pretty well” and said they would “reduce 'DDoS'.”
“Dear tabloids, why didn't you write about such an event sooner?” they said. “I don't expect you to write anything good, because then who's going to read you? But there was a lot of drama, right? Because you didn't have Johnny nagging you?”