Archive.today also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph, which are useful sources of citations for Wikipedia.
However, according to Wikipedia's recent discussion page on this topic: "There has been consensus on immediately removing archive.today and as soon as possible, adding it to the blacklist against spam and immediately deleting all links to it".
The discussion page said that archive.today was once blacklisted in 2013, but was removed from the blacklist in 2016.
Why change the direction again? Because, the discussion site said, "Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a website that takes control of the user's computer to carry out DDoS attacks". In addition, "there is evidence that archive.today operators have changed the content of the stored pages, making them unreliable".
The mentioned DDoS attack is believed to be aimed at blogger Jani Patokallio. In 2023, Patokallio posted an article on the Archive.today analysis blog, which he described as "an incomprehensible mystery".
And although the specific owner could not be found, he concluded that the website could be "a passionate project of an individual, run by a talented Russian with wide ties to Europe".
More recently, Patokallio said that the administrator of the archive.today website asked him to remove the post within two or three months.
According to emails that Patokallio shared, the website administrator said: "I don't object to the post, but the problem is that journalists from mainstream media only select a few words from your blog, then create completely different stories, in which your post is the only source to be quoted; then they quote each other and create a bad result to present to the public".
Patokallio said that after he refused to remove the post, the website administrator responded with "a series of increasingly out-of-control threats".
Wikipedia editors also pointed out screenshots of the website on archive.today that appeared to have been edited to insert Patokallio's name - thus raising concerns that the website had become "unreliable" as a repository.
Wikipedia's current guidelines require editors to delete links to archive.today and related websites, replacing them with links to the original source or to other repository such as Wayback Machine.
