Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a popular web archiving service that has been cited more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.
The move follows a community discussion that concluded the site should be deprecated immediately, added to the spam blacklist, and stripped from existing pages as soon as possible.
Archive.today, which also operates under domain names such as archive.is and archive.ph, is widely used to access web pages that are blocked by paywalls. This has made it a convenient tool for Wikipedia editors looking to cite otherwise inaccessible sources.
However, editors raised serious concerns about the platform’s behavior. According to the discussion page, Wikipedia should not direct readers to a website that allegedly hijacks users’ computers to carry out a distributed denial of service attack. There were also claims that the site’s operators altered archived pages, raising doubts about its reliability as a trusted source.
The DDoS incident reportedly targeted blogger Jani Patokallio. He wrote that starting January 11, visitors who loaded Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page were unknowingly running JavaScript that sent search requests to his blog, Gyrovague. Patokallio suggested the move was an attempt to get his attention and increase his hosting costs.
In 2023, Patokallio published a blog post investigating Archive.today and described its ownership as unclear. While he could not identify a specific owner, he suggested it was likely run by a single individual, possibly a Russian operator with strong technical skills and access to European infrastructure.
More recently, Patokallio said the site’s webmaster asked him to remove his blog post temporarily, claiming that journalists were misrepresenting his writing and using it as the only cited source in broader reports. After Patokallio declined, he said the webmaster responded with a series of escalating threats. Emails shared by Patokallio included a message from the webmaster criticizing media coverage and accusing journalists of distorting the story.
Wikipedia editors also cited examples of archived pages on Archive.today that appeared to have been modified to insert Patokallio’s name. This further fueled concerns that the service could not be trusted to preserve content accurately.
Wikipedia previously blacklisted Archive.today in 2013 before removing it from the blacklist in 2016. The latest decision reverses that course once again. Editors are now encouraged to replace Archive.today links with original sources or alternative archiving services such as the Wayback Machine.
On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner defended the service, arguing that its value to Wikipedia was not about bypassing paywalls but about handling copyright issues. The owner also suggested they would scale down the alleged DDoS activity and criticized media outlets for what they described as selective reporting.
If this article helped you, please consider supporting our work. Every small contribution keeps Abijita.com independent and running.
With the new guidance in place, Wikipedia is moving to distance itself from Archive.today, citing concerns over user safety and the integrity of archived content.
