Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they say has been linked more than 695,000 times in the online encyclopedia.
Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps the most widely used for accessing content otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. This also makes it useful as a source of Wikipedia citations.
However, according to Wikipedia’s talk page on the topic, “there is consensus to end support for archive.today immediately and, as soon as possible, to blacklist it as spam (…) and remove all links to it without delay.” (Ars Technica first reported the decision.)
The talk page says that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why the reverse course again? Because the talk page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a website that hijacks users’ computers to perform a DDoS attack.” In addition, “evidence was presented that the operators of archive.today altered the content of the archived pages and made them unreliable.”
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that starting on January 11th, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page unwittingly loaded and executed JavaScript that sent a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting bill.
In 2023, Patokallio published a blog post investigating Archive.today, whose ownership he described as an “opaque secret”. And while he was unable to track down a specific owner, he concluded that the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, run by a Russian with considerable talent and access to Europe.”
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Recently, Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take the site down for two or three months.
“I don’t mind the post, but the point is that journalists from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc.) take just a few words from your blog and then create very different stories with your post as the only citeable source; then they quote each other and create a crappy result that they present to a wide audience,” the webmaster said, according to emails shared by Patokallio.
Patokallio said that after he refused to take over his post, the webmaster responded with “a series of increasingly unhinged threats”.
Wikipedia editors also pointed to screenshots of the website at Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to include Patokallio’s name – hence the concern that it had become “unreliable” as an archive.
Wikipedia’s guidelines now call for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related pages and replace them with links to the original source or to other archives such as the Wayback Machine.
In a blog linked from Archive.today, the site’s apparent owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia lies not in “paywalls” but rather in “the ability to get rid of copyright issues.” They later wrote that it went “pretty well” and said it would “reduce ‘DDoS’.”
“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, tabloid people?” they said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was a lot of drama, wasn’t there? Because there was no Jani to poke you?”