Wikipedia's volunteer editors have voted to blacklist the web archiving service Archive.today, removing all links to it from the online encyclopedia. The decision, first reported by Ars Technica, follows allegations that the site hijacked users' computers to conduct a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and altered the content of archived pages.
The service, which also operates under domains like archive.is and archive.ph, has been linked more than 695,000 times across Wikipedia. It is commonly used to access content behind paywalls and as a source for citations. Editors concluded the site should be "immediately" deprecated and added to the spam blacklist.
Allegations of Attacks and Tampering
The discussion leading to the blacklist cites two primary concerns. First, that "Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack." The alleged attack targeted blogger Jani Patokallio.
Patokallio wrote that from January 11, users loading Archive.today's CAPTCHA page unknowingly executed JavaScript that sent search requests to his Gyrovague blog. He described this as an apparent attempt to get his attention and increase his hosting costs.
Second, editors presented "evidence that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable." This includes webpage snapshots that appeared to be altered to insert Patokallio's name.
A Contentious History and Opaque Ownership
This is not the first time Archive.today has faced sanctions from Wikipedia. The service was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the list in 2016.
In a 2023 blog post, Patokallio investigated the site's ownership, describing it as "an opaque mystery." While unable to identify a specific owner, he concluded it was likely "a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe."
According to emails shared by Patokallio, the site's webmaster later asked him to take the post down for two or three months, complaining that mainstream media outlets were "cherry-picking" words to construct different narratives. After Patokallio declined, he said the webmaster responded with "an increasingly unhinged series of threats."
New Guidance and Operator Response
Wikipedia's new guidance instructs editors to remove links to Archive.today and related domains, replacing them with links to the original source or to other archives like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the apparent owner wrote that the site's value to Wikipedia was "not about paywalls" but "the ability to offload copyright issues." In a later post, they stated things had turned out "pretty well" and they would "scale down the 'DDoS'." They also questioned why media had not written about "plenty of dramas" before.