Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today, Starts Removing 695,000 Archive Links

Source: Slashdot

Background

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:

The English‑language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial‑of‑service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

Consensus and Action

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

Scope of Removal

• More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across roughly 400,000 Wikipedia pages.
• The archive site, which is under investigation by the FBI to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.
• Editors who favor maintaining the status quo argue that Archive.today is valuable for verifiability, but an analysis shows that most of its uses can be replaced.
• Several editors have begun working out implementation details during this RfC (request for comment) and the community is planning how to efficiently remove the links.

Original story on Slashdot.