Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack
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.
However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page about this topic, “There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist […] and to forthwith remove all links to it.” (Ars Technica first reported on the decision.)
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.”
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