Wikipedia editors decided to remove links to Archive.today across the encyclopedia, where it had been linked more than 695,000 times. The consensus described on the relevant Wikipedia discussion page was to immediately deprecate Archive.today and, as soon as practical, add it to the spam blacklist, followed by removing all links to it.

Archive.today also operates through other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph, and it’s commonly used to access content that’s otherwise blocked—especially content behind paywalls. That practical usefulness has also made it attractive for citations. But usefulness isn’t the same thing as trust, and Wikipedia’s decision hinges on that gap.

Why Wikipedia Reversed Course Again After Past Blacklist History

This wasn’t the first time Archive.today ran into Wikipedia’s blacklist. The discussion page notes it was previously blacklisted in 2013, then removed from the blacklist in 2016.

This time, editors argued they shouldn’t be sending readers to a site alleged to have engaged in behavior that effectively uses visitors’ computers as part of a disruptive campaign. On top of that, editors weighed evidence suggesting that archived pages may have been altered—an especially serious problem for an encyclopedia that depends on verifiability and stable citations.

The Allegation at the Center: “Hijacks Users’ Computers” for a DDoS

The key justification cited in the Wikipedia discussion is blunt: Wikipedia “should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.”

The alleged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) incident was said to be directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. According to Patokallio, starting on January 11, users loading Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page were unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript that generated search requests to his Gyrovague blog. The alleged effect wasn’t just traffic—it was pressure, attention, and potentially increased costs tied to hosting.

In other words, the complaint isn’t framed as a purely technical dispute. It’s presented as an abuse pattern: a mechanism that leverages unsuspecting users to push requests at a target.

Reliability Concerns: Alleged Alteration of Archived Pages

Beyond the DDoS allegation, Wikipedia editors also pointed to evidence that Archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, which would make the archive unreliable as a citation tool.

The discussion highlighted concerns about webpage snapshots on Archive.today that appeared to be modified to insert Patokallio’s name. Even if you strip away every emotional layer here, that’s the kind of claim that hits Wikipedia right where it lives: if the archive can’t be trusted to preserve the original record, it stops being an archive in the way Wikipedia needs it to be.

Who Is Behind Archive.today? “Opaque Mystery” and Speculation

Patokallio previously examined Archive.today in a 2023 blog post and described its ownership as an “opaque mystery.” While he reportedly couldn’t identify a specific owner, he concluded the site was likely a one-person project—“a labor of love”—run by “a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

That background matters in the context of Wikipedia’s decision because a tool used at Wikipedia scale carries real-world responsibility. When control appears centralized and unclear, it can amplify concerns about governance, accountability, and integrity—especially when paired with allegations of hostile or coercive behavior.

Reported Communications and Threats After a Takedown Request

Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take his post down for “two or three months,” complaining that journalists “cherry-pick” parts of the blog post, build narratives around it, and then cite each other.

Patokallio said that after he declined, the webmaster responded with what he described as an “increasingly unhinged” series of threats. In the Wikipedia context, that kind of reported conduct contributes to the overall risk profile: the issue isn’t just whether the site works, but whether it behaves in ways consistent with a reliable public reference infrastructure.

Wikipedia’s guidance now calls for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related domains, and to replace them with either:

  • the original source, or
  • alternative archives such as the Wayback Machine

This is a practical shift, not just a symbolic one. It changes the day-to-day work of editors who rely on archival links to keep citations stable when original pages move, disappear, or become paywalled.

A blog linked from the Archive.today site includes posts attributed to the site’s apparent owner. In those posts, the owner suggested Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia wasn’t mainly about bypassing paywalls. Instead, they argued it helped Wikipedia by offloading copyright issues.

Later, the apparent owner wrote that things had turned out “pretty well” and said they would scale down the DDoS.