Editors on Wikipedia have chosen to eliminate all references to Archive.today, a web archiving platform that they noted has been cited over 695,000 times throughout the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today — which is also accessible via several other domains, such as archive.is and archive.ph — is primarily employed to retrieve content that is otherwise hidden behind paywalls. This functionality also renders it valuable for Wikipedia references.

Nevertheless, as per the Wikipedia discussion page on this issue, “There is agreement to promptly deprecate archive.today, and, at the earliest opportunity, to include it on the spam blacklist […] and to immediately eliminate all links to it.” (Ars Technica was the first to cover this matter.)

The discussion page indicates that Archive.today was previously placed on a blacklist in 2013 but was removed from it in 2016.

Why the change in direction? The discussion page explains that “Wikipedia should not direct its users to a site that commandeers visitors’ computers to conduct a DDoS attack.” Furthermore, “evidence has been shown that the operators of archive.today have modified the content of archived pages, making it unreliable.”

The DDoS attack in question allegedly targeted blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio reported that starting January 11, individuals visiting the archive’s CAPTCHA page were unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript that sends a search query to his Gyrovague blog, seemingly to attract Patokallio’s attention and inflate his hosting costs.

In 2023, Patokallio penned a blog entry investigating Archive.today, which he described as “an opaque mystery.” Although he could not identify a specific owner, he deduced that the site was likely “a solitary labor of love, managed by a remarkably skilled Russian with access to Europe.”

Recently, Patokallio stated that the Archive.today webmaster requested he remove the blog post for a duration of two or three months.

“I don’t have an issue with the post, but the concern is: journalists from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc) selectively highlight just a few words from your blog, and then create very different narratives making your post the sole citable source; they then reference each other and produce a poor outcome for a broad audience,” the webmaster mentioned, according to emails shared by Patokallio.

Patokallio remarked that after he declined the request to remove the post, the webmaster replied with “a progressively unhinged series of threats.”

Wikipedia editors also pointed out that some webpage snapshots on Archive.today appeared to have been modified to include Patokallio’s name — raising concerns about its reliability as an archive.

Wikipedia’s current recommendations instruct editors to eliminate links to Archive.today and similar sites, substituting them with links to the original sources or to alternative archives like the Wayback Machine.

On a blog associated with the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner noted that the value of Archive.today to Wikipedia was “not about paywalls” but rather “the capacity to offload copyright concerns.” They subsequently remarked that things had turned out “pretty well” and indicated they would “reduce the ‘DDoS’.”

“Why didn’t you report on such happenings earlier, tabloid folks?” they stated. “I don’t expect you to produce anything favorable, because who would read you then, but there was a lot of drama, wasn’t there? Especially since there was no Jani to prompt you?”