Wikipedia editors have just reached a consensus to remove all links leading to Archive.today, a web hosting service cited more than 695,000 times on this online encyclopedia.
The decision included putting the service's domain name on the spam blacklist, and requiring replacement with original links or other repositories.
Archive.today operates under many domain names such as archive.is or archive.ph, which has long been used to access locked or disappeared content from the internet.
This makes it a convenient reference for the Wikipedia editing community. However, according to the internal discussion page, many members believe that this platform is no longer reliable and poses security risks for users.
Information about the decision was first published by the famous US technology and science news site Ars Technica. Wikipedia's discussion page stated that the main reason is the suspicion that Archive.today "uses user computers to carry out DDoS attacks".
In addition, editors also pointed out evidence that some archives show signs of content being edited after scanning, reducing reliability as a reference source.
The accusation of DDoS attack originated from the incident related to technology blogger Jani Patokallio. According to him, from January 11, people accessing the CAPTCHA page of Archive.today accidentally downloaded JavaScript code and sent a large number of search requests to his blog Gyrovague. This action is believed to be aimed at putting pressure on storage costs and attracting attention.
Wikipedia also mentions screenshots showing that some storage pages appear to have been edited to insert the name Patokallio, raising concerns about the possibility of content manipulation.
Therefore, the new guide requires editors to replace the Archive.today link with the original source or other repository such as Wayback Machine.
This is not the first time Archive.today has been banned by Wikipedia. The service was blacklisted in 2013, then removed in 2016.
However, with new concerns about security and reliability, the editorial community has decided to tighten its stance, marking a notable change in the policy of reference sources of the world's largest online encyclopedia.
