Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that has been linked over 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia. Archive.today, which also operates under domain names like archive.is and archive.ph, is widely used to access content behind paywalls, making it a common source for Wikipedia citations.
According to a Wikipedia discussion page, there is consensus to immediately deprecate Archive.today, add it to the spam blacklist, and remove all links to it. The page states that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013 before being removed from the list in 2016.
The reversal is due to two primary concerns. First, Wikipedia should not direct readers to a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Second, evidence suggests Archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering the service unreliable.
The alleged DDoS attack was directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. He reported that beginning on January 11, users loading the archive’s CAPTCHA page unknowingly executed JavaScript that sent search requests to his blog, apparently to get his attention and increase his hosting costs.
In 2023, Patokallio published an investigation into Archive.today, describing its ownership as an opaque mystery. He concluded the site was likely a one-person operation run by a talented Russian with access to Europe. More recently, Patokallio said the Archive.today webmaster asked him to take the post down, citing misrepresentation by journalists. After Patokallio refused, the webmaster responded with a series of threats.
Wikipedia editors also cited webpage snapshots in Archive.today that appeared to be altered to insert Patokallio’s name, supporting the claim of unreliability.
Wikipedia’s new guidance instructs editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or other archives like the Wayback Machine.
On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner wrote that its value to Wikipedia was not about paywalls but the ability to offload copyright issues. In a later post, they stated things had turned out pretty well and they would scale down the DDoS activity, questioning why media outlets had not written about similar events earlier.