The first paragraphs of the article.
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.
“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.”
A Bluesky comment.
The owner of Archive Today was in a dispute with a blogger who published the archivist's pseudonym, and in retaliation years later, the archivist manipulated their archive of that blog, replacing the pseudonym with the bloggers own name. As though the blogger were accusing himself. And then tried to DDoS the blog so that their manipulated archive would be the only surviving copy. I guess???
That's just very complicated and very weird and pointless,.
Dismissing the ability to actually read a source as "only a matter of convenience". A book source might as well be on the moon for the vast majority of readers and they know this. Anyone trying to bury an archive is relying on this fact in order to reduce accountability for what they've written. Someone is real mad they can't go after archive.today with law suits like those trying to kill archive.org and this looks like the new strategy.
The dumbass owner did it themself. Fuck em. Don't manipulate the past if you're trying to be an archivist
I once bought a referenced book to check a source on wikipedia, and the referenced fact did not appear in the book…
Books are good, actually. And Anna's Archive is a great convenience.