Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-03-10/Technology_report

PDF.

After the website archive.today launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started. After the discovery of tampered archives, consensus was reached to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times on the English Wikipedia.

122 points · 7 comments · view on lemmy.world

7 Comments

null@lemmy.org · 36 pts · 168d (3 replies)

Wikipedia not having their own archives by now is a huge vulnerability.

maus@sh.itjust.works · 15 pts · 168d

Especially given the amount of money they've raised. Insane that at this point they didn't have a system to automatically archive any sources automatically

baatliwala@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 168d

https://archivebox.io/ exists, they need to get to self-hosting one asap

NekoKoneko@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 167d

Them hosting their own archives of copyrighted articles would need to be non-public (for citation verification only), since if they did an archive.today-like public service, it would certainly get them sued by a constant carousel of copyright owners until they run out of money.

Archive.org might be a sign that most would look the other way, but given how tight Wikipedia's funding is, I don't think that's a good idea.

Tetsuo@jlai.lu · 23 pts · 168d

Archive.today owner looks like a clown.

I had no idea they were doing all kinds of nefarious shit like that.

Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip · 21 pts · 168d (1 reply)

Pepperage Farm remembers when Wikipedia was mass transitioning citations to archive sites because the original sites couldn't be trusted to retain the information over time.

Oh how the turn tables.

Scrollone@feddit.it · 8 pts · 167d

Wikipedia still does that, but only for trusted websites such as archive.org