Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service they said has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the entire online encyclopedia.
Archive.today — which also works with many other domain names, including file.is and archive.ph — perhaps most widely used to access content otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. This also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia references.
However, according to Wikipedia’s talk page on this topic“There is a consensus to immediately remove archive.today and, as soon as possible, add to the spam blacklist […] and to immediately remove all links to it.” (Ars Technica originally reported on the decision.)
The talk page states that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why reverse course again? Because, the talk page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a site that hacks users’ computers to perform a DDoS attack.” In addition, “evidence was presented that the operators of archive.today have changed the content of the archived pages, making them untrustworthy.”
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question is reportedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that as of January 11, users who loaded the file’s CAPTCHA page have loading and executing JavaScript without knowing it who sends a search request to Gyrovague’s blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting account.
In 2023, Patokalleio was launched a blog post reviewing Archive.today, whose ownership he described as “an opaque mystery”. And while he was unable to identify a specific owner, he concluded that the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian with considerable talent and access to Europe.”
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More recently, Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take down the post for two or three months.
“I don’t mind the post, but the point is: reporters from the mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc.) pick just a few words from your blog and then create wildly different narratives with your post as their sole reference. They then quote each other and produce a lousy result to present to a wide audience,” said the webmaster, according to email shared by Patokallio.
Patokallio said that after refusing to take down the post, the webmaster responded with “an increasingly seamless series of threats.”
Wikipedia editors too showed web page snapshots on Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to include Patokallios’ name — hence the concern that it has become “unreliable” as an archive.
of Wikipedia leading now asks editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or other archives such as the Wayback Machine.
On a blog linked by Archive.today, the apparent owner of the site he wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia “wasn’t about paywalls” but rather “the ability to offload copyright issues”. They later he wrote that things had progressed “very well” and said they would “reduce DDoS”.
“Why didn’t you write about events like this sooner, tabloid guys?” 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 Janie to push you?”
