Wikipedia editors decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service with more than 695,000 links throughout the online encyclopedia.
Archive.today, which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph, is probably the most widely used for accessing content otherwise inaccessible behind a paywall. It is also useful as a Wikipedia citation source.
However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page on the topic: “An agreement has been reached today to immediately deprecate archive., add it to the spam blacklist as soon as possible (…) and immediately remove all links to it.” (Ars Technica first reported on this decision.)
The talk page states that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, but was removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why reverse course again? Because the talk page says, “Wikipedia must not direct readers to websites that hijack users’ computers to carry out DDoS attacks.” Additionally, “evidence has been presented that the administrators of archive.today have altered the content of archived pages, rendering them unreliable.”
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was reportedly targeted at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that starting January 11, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page unknowingly loaded and executed JavaScript that sent search requests to the Gyrovague blog in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting costs.
In 2023, Patokallio published a blog post examining Archive.today, whose ownership he described as an “opaque mystery.” Although he was unable to trace a specific owner, he concluded that the site was likely “a one-man labor of love run by a Russian with considerable talent and access to Europe.”
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Recently, Patokallio said Archive.today’s webmaster asked him to take down the post for two to three months.
“I don’t mind the post, but the problem is that journalists in mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc.) pick a few words from blogs, then use the post as the only source of citations to construct very different narratives, then quote each other and produce crappy results,” the webmaster said, according to an email shared by Patokallio.
Patokallio said that when he refused to remove the post, the webmaster responded with “a series of increasingly volatile threats.”
Wikipedia editors also pointed to a snapshot of a webpage on Archive.today that appears to have been altered to insert Patokallio’s name. There are concerns that it will therefore become “unreliable” as an archive.
Wikipedia’s guidelines now require 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 site’s apparent owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia “is not about the paywall,” but rather “its ability to offload copyright issues.” They later wrote that things were “going very well” and that they “will be curtailing the ‘DDoS’.”
“Tabloids, why didn’t you write about such an incident sooner?” they said “I don’t expect you to write good stuff. Then there was a lot of drama because who would read you? Wasn’t it because there wasn’t Jani to nudge you?”
