Wikipedia’s editing community has moved to blacklist Archive.today, initiating the removal of hundreds of thousands of links to the archiving service after volunteers alleged it weaponized visitors’ browsers in a distributed denial of service attack and manipulated archived content. The decision affects a tool long relied upon for accessing paywalled articles and preserving citations across the encyclopedia.
What Prompted the Blacklist Decision by Editors
Editors concluded a formal discussion with consensus to deprecate Archive.today and add it to Wikipedia’s spam blacklist, a technical list that prevents future additions of the service’s URLs. Volunteers noted that Archive.today and its sister domains (including archive.is and archive.ph) were referenced in more than 695,000 links across the project. The blacklisting reverses a previous arc: the service was blocked in 2013 and later reinstated in 2016. News of the fresh ban was first highlighted by technology reporters following the community’s deliberations.
Allegations of DDoS Activity From Archive.today
The immediate spark was an allegation from blogger Jani Patokallio that Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page surreptitiously executed JavaScript causing visitors’ browsers to generate repeated requests to his personal site. While the traffic volume was not disclosed publicly by Wikipedia, editors argued that directing readers to a service that can conscript unsuspecting users into a coordinated request burst is incompatible with the encyclopedia’s safety standards.
In practical terms, the claim describes a browser-based amplification tactic: each page view loads code that pings a targeted site, raising costs and visibility for the victim. Although Archive.today has not issued a comprehensive technical rebuttal addressing the specific code paths, the pattern described was persuasive enough for Wikipedia volunteers focused on abuse mitigation to recommend immediate deprecation.
Concerns Over Content Integrity in Archived Pages
Beyond the alleged DDoS behavior, editors raised alarms about archival integrity. Multiple snapshots in Archive.today appeared to include post-archival edits, including the insertion of an individual’s name into unrelated pages. For an encyclopedia that prizes verifiability, the prospect of mutable “archives” undermines a core reason these links are used in citations in the first place.
Compounding the concern is the service’s opaque ownership. Patokallio’s earlier research characterized Archive.today as likely operated by a single individual, with little public accountability. While anonymity is not inherently disqualifying, Wikipedia’s reliability policies weigh provenance and tamper resistance heavily when endorsing external tools at scale.
Impact on Wikipedia Citations and Link Maintenance
With blacklisting in effect, editors are instructed to remove existing Archive.today links and replace them with the original source or trusted alternatives such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This is no small housekeeping task: English Wikipedia alone sees around 15 billion pageviews monthly, according to Wikimedia Foundation statistics, and link rot is a persistent challenge for such a widely used reference work.
Expect a mix of community scripts and bot-assisted passes—such as InternetArchiveBot, which has historically repaired millions of dead links—to handle the bulk cleanup while human editors adjudicate tricky edge cases around paywalled or dynamically generated pages.
What Archive.today Says in Response to Claims
A blog post attributed to Archive.today’s operator downplayed the notion that the service’s primary value to Wikipedia was paywall circumvention, arguing it also helped mitigate copyright headaches for editors. The post also suggested the controversial traffic-generating behavior would be dialed back. Separately, Patokallio shared emails in which the service’s webmaster urged him to remove earlier reporting about the site; he declined and described receiving escalating messages afterward.
The Bigger Archiving Picture and Trade-offs Ahead
Web archiving remains an essential countermeasure to link rot and content churn. The Internet Archive says its Wayback Machine has preserved hundreds of billions of pages, and services like Perma.cc are widely used by courts and journals to create permanent citations. Archive.today built a following by capturing dynamic pages quickly and rendering tricky JavaScript-heavy sites, features that made it a fixture in some Wikipedia workflows—particularly for paywalled news.
The blacklist underscores a trade-off the Wikipedia community has long debated: accessibility versus trust. When an archival service is accused of manipulating users’ browsers and altering snapshots, the needle moves decisively toward caution. The coming weeks will show how efficiently existing links can be migrated and whether Archive.today addresses the technical and governance concerns that precipitated the ban.
