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.
Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that’s otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. That also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.
The discussion page says that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why reverse course again? Because, the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” Plus, “evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”
They buried the lede — the decision to blocklist them was because the archived pages were modified in a petty fit of retribution, meaning the archive can no longer be considered an archive (its contents can’t be trusted to stay the same).
The DDoS was just the spotlight that got them thinking about it.