The English language version of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.
During a discussion of whether Archive.today should be deleted due to the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. These changes were apparently caused by outrage against the blogger over a post that described how the maintainer of Archive.today had hidden his identity behind multiple aliases.
An update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion said, “The consensus is to immediately reject Archive.today and, as quickly as possible, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an editing filter that prevents adding new links) and remove all links to it.” “There is strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a website that hijacks users’ computers to conduct a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that the operators of Archive.today have altered the content of archived pages, making it unreliable.”
Archive.today has over 695,000 links distributed across nearly 400,000 Wikipedia pages. Archive sites are commonly used to bypass news paywalls etc.
Today’s Wikipedia update states, “Those in favor of maintaining the status quo based their arguments primarily on the usefulness of Archive.today for verification.” “However, analysis of existing links revealed that most of its uses could be changed. Several editors have begun working on implementation details during this RFC [request for comment] And the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to Archive.today.”
Editors requested to remove link
Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: Archive.today, Archive.is, Archive.ph, Archive.fo, Archive.li, Archive.md, and Archive.vn. The guidance states that editors may remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has the same content; Change the archive link so that it points to a different archive site, such as Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; Or “Change the original source to something that does not require an archive (for example, a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is merely a matter of convenience.”
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