\n<\/p>\n
Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.<\/p>\n
Archive.today \u2014 which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is<\/a> and archive.ph<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is perhaps most widely used to access content that\u2019s otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. That also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.<\/p>\n However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page about this topic<\/a>, \u201cThere is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist [\u2026] and to forthwith remove all links to it.\u201d (Ars Technica first reported on the decision<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The discussion page says that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.<\/p>\n Why reverse course again? Because, the discussion page says, \u201cWikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users\u2019 computers to run a DDoS attack.\u201d Plus, \u201cevidence has been presented that archive.today\u2019s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.\u201d<\/p>\n The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that beginning on January 11, users who loaded the archive\u2019s CAPTCHA page have been unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript<\/a> that sends a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio\u2019s attention and increase his hosting bill.<\/p>\n Back in 2023, Patokallio published a blog post<\/a> examining Archive.today, whose ownership he described as \u201can opaque mystery.\u201d And while he wasn\u2019t able to track down a specific owner, he concluded the site was likely \u201ca one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA<\/span> More recently, Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take the post down for two or three months.<\/p>\n \u201cI do not mind the post, but the issue is: journos from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc) cherry-pick just a couple of words from your blog, and then construct very different narratives having your post the only citable source; then they cite each other and produce a shitty result to present for a wide audience,\u201d the webmaster said, according to emails shared by Patokallio<\/a>.<\/p>\n Patokallio said that after he declined to take the post down, the webmaster responded with \u201can increasingly unhinged series of threats.\u201d<\/p>\n Wikipedia editors also pointed to webpage snapshots<\/a> in Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio\u2019s name \u2014 hence the concern that it\u2019s become \u201cunreliable\u201d as an archive.<\/p>\n Wikipedia\u2019s guidance<\/a> now calls for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or to other archives like the Wayback Machine.<\/p>\n On a blog<\/a> linked from the Archive.today website, the site\u2019s apparent owner wrote<\/a> that Archive.today\u2019s value to Wikipedia was \u201cnot about paywalls\u201d but rather \u201cthe ability to offload copyright issues.\u201d They later wrote<\/a> that things had turned out \u201cpretty well\u201d and said they would \u201cscale down the \u2018DDoS\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids?\u201d they said. \u201cI don\u2019t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn\u2019t there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 9, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n