"Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website's anonymous maintainer. In a request for comment page, Wikipedia's volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo."
"Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive," the Wikipedia request for comment said. "Due to concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and how the site is run, the community decided to blacklist it in 2013. In 2016, the decision was overturned, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist.""
""Wikipedia's need for verifiable citations is absolutely not more important than the security of users," one editor in favor of blacklisting wrote. "We need verifiable citations so that we can maintain readers' trust, however, in order to be trustworthy our references also have to be safe to access.""
Wikipedia volunteer editors were presented with three options regarding Archive.today: remove or hide all links and add the site to the spam blacklist; deprecate the site while keeping existing archived links; or take no action. Option A would affect more than 695,000 links across roughly 400,000 Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls and uses advanced scraping methods that some consider more reliable than the Internet Archive. The site was blacklisted in 2013 and removed from the blacklist in 2016. Editors cited concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and user security.
Read at Ars Technica
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