Wikipedia editors have agreed to remove all links to Archive.today and its related domains after concluding that the service should no longer be used as a citation source, a decision that affects more than 695,000 links across the encyclopedia.
Decision And Scope Of The Change
Archive.today, which also operates under domain names such as archive.is and archive.ph, has been widely used to access content behind paywalls and has often appeared in Wikipedia citations. According to the Wikipedia discussion page on the issue, editors reached “consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist […] and to forthwith remove all links to it.” Ars Technica first reported on the decision.
The discussion page notes that Archive.today had been blacklisted before, in 2013, and then removed from the blacklist in 2016. The latest decision reverses that earlier change.
Reasons Cited By Editors
Editors said Wikipedia should not direct readers to a site that “hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack” and added that evidence had been presented showing that Archive.today’s operators altered the content of archived pages, which they said makes the service unreliable.
The distributed denial of service activity cited in the discussion was allegedly aimed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that starting on January 11, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page were unknowingly running JavaScript that sent search requests to his Gyrovague blog, which he said appeared intended to get his attention and raise his hosting costs.
Background On The Dispute
In 2023, Patokallio published a blog post examining Archive.today and described its ownership as “an opaque mystery.” He said he could not identify a specific owner but concluded the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”
More recently, Patokallio said the site’s webmaster asked him to take the post down for two or three months. In emails shared by Patokallio, the webmaster said journalists from outlets such as Heise and The Verge had taken phrases from the post, built different narratives around them, and cited each other using his post as the source. Patokallio said that after he refused to remove the post, the webmaster responded with what he described as “an increasingly unhinged series of threats.”
Wikipedia editors also pointed to snapshots on Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio’s name, which they cited as part of the concern that the service had become unreliable as an archive.
New Guidance For Citations
Wikipedia’s guidance now instructs editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites and to replace them with links to the original sources or to other archives, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Response From Archive.today
On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner wrote that the service’s value to Wikipedia was “not about paywalls” but rather “the ability to offload copyright issues.” The same blog later said the situation had turned out “pretty well” and that the site would “scale down the ‘DDoS’.”
“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids?” the post said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn’t there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you?”
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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