Forum:CT:Archival links update

Last year, NanoLuuke led the Forum:SH:Archival links update discussion on updating our archival link system, a great part of which has been relying on an increasingly dubious archive.today. Reports now indicate that the one guy running the site (which is, again, a major problem of itself; the site operator has said that one day the site could just disappear) is using visitors to send network requests (on the new CAPTCHA page, which is actually frequently stuck loading and hence stopping people from properly using the site anyway) to run DDoS attacks against another guy, and Wikipedia came to the consensus of deprecating it yesterday. The archive.today blog has been spending the past month saying it is "worth it" to be "discrediting" their own service for the ongoing feud and ranting about "the left," "Nazis," the FBI, and Ukraine. Whatever's going on, we should *probably* keep clear.

Wookieepedia is not Wikipedia, but we have been discussing the issue intermittently over the past few years as well. I have copied over the remaining proposals from the SH that received broad agreement on last year, with some modifications, like the added clause to stop new archive.today links from being added. Existing links ideally should be replaced, but that's complicated by the fact that a lot of them are there because the Wayback Machine doesn't work for the respective webpages, and a lot of them are also there to support screenshots that have been uploaded to the site. Figuring out what to do with them should be the next step in this problem, but I'll leave it outside this CT.

Otherwise, we would just codifying what we've been doing, which is to use Wayback in the first instance and then trying an alternative like ghostarchive.org if it doesn't work. We would also emphasise that if Wayback is not used, then screenshots should be uploaded to Wookieepedia (for {{WebCite}} and social media citation templates), which would move us in the direction of relying on ourselves.

This isn't a complete solution. We know the Internet Archive (in contrast a legitimate organisation) has been dealing with legal issues of its own, and ultimately, we should not rely on any external website for archival purposes. But this proposal has been too far delayed, and archive.today is too far gone.

Under Wookieepedia:Sourcing#Archival links, change this:

When citing an external link, a permanent archival link (also called a backup link) must be included in the reference. Use [https://web.archive.org Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] or [https://archive.is archive.today] for this purpose.

To this:

When citing an external link, a permanent archival link (also called a backup link) must be included in the reference. Use [https://web.archive.org Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] for this purpose. If the Wayback Machine cannot archive a particular webpage, then use another archive service, such as [https://ghostarchive.org ghostarchive.org]. Do not add new links to [[Wikipedia:archive.today|archive.today]] and its associated domains such as archive.ph.

*'''Furthermore, if using a service other than the Wayback Machine for archiving a web document with {{Tl|WebCite}} or any [[:Category:Social media citation templates|social media citation templates]], an accompanying screenshot must also be uploaded to Wookieepedia and linked in the reference itself, and the screenshot must be added to either [[Wookieepedia:Website screenshots]] or [[Wookieepedia:Social media screenshots]]. However, a social media listing within the "[[Wookieepedia:Layout_Guide#External links|External links]]" section does not require an associated screenshot, with the exception of {{Tl|LinkedIn}}.'''

Support[]

1. OOM 224 12:41, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
2. At this point, relying on archive.today is a risky choice, and I think we should stop depending on this site as much as possible. あざした (Azashita) 14:21, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
3. Rakhsh (talk) 14:45, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
4. Yasen Nestorov (talk) 14:56, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
5. If only Wayback Machine is not as crappy as it is… Most transparent out of all, but a lot less reliable. Bonzane10 15:50, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
6. I'll make my own archival website, with blackjack and (the rest of the Futurama quote that I probably can't post here)! - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 18:03, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
7. Tbh I'm surprised we ever used it much at all. I use it for a lot of other things though and this is very upsetting nonetheless. Fan26 (Talk) 18:11, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
8. CometSmudge (talk) 19:01, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
9. —spookywilloww^talk 00:48, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
10. Chipchip88 (talk) 01:55, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Oppose[]

Discuss[]

• Hey everyone! Sorry that this is the kind of thing that is needed for me to reappears. Tanks OOM for being reactive to this whole mess. I can't vote because I've not been editing this last 6 months, but I'm definitely in support. If anyone is interested, here is some more documentation on the issue:

1. archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet (Gyrovague blog, August 5, 2023)
2. archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog (Gyrovague blog, February 1, 2026)
3. Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site (Ars Technica, February 10, 2026)
4. Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links (Ars Technica, February 20, 2026)
   
   To note, when we started taking action about archive.today on November 27, 2024, there was by my count 18,837 archive.today links on Wookieepedia; this has dropped to 16,605 (-2,232) since. Exact details: links concerned are archive.is (current: 5,659, since 11/24: -1,838, archive.ph (current: 6,852, since 11/24: +790), archive.vn (current: 3,575, since 11/24: -1,085), archive.md (current: 268, since 11/24: -79), archive.fo (current: 207, since 11/24: -10) and archive.li (current: 64, since 11/24: -10). We can see .ph is progressing in the wrong way, showing that it has still being added on the wook since, but this is counterbalanced by the reduction in other domains. Many thanks to those who already started to actively hunt those links! NanoLuuke^{Cloning Facility} 21:35, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

• • Hmm, some of the new .ph links might've been my doing. In citing SWTOR NPC genders to Jedipeida's NPC database, I've left notes on the talk pages of those articles saying as much with both Wayback Machine archive dot today links, usually of the .ph domain, for redundancy's sake. See here for an example. None of those .ph links I added are in any active citations. Fan26 (Talk) 00:46, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
  • I… uh… I'm probably the one who is the most responsible for all that. Been sourcing all information I find at Getty Images on archive.ph since back when I had problems with sourcing a specific asset on the site in the Wayback Machine. I was entirely unaware of the "lore" that archive.today possesses until this consensus track, and will make sure any further information sourced from Getty Images does not link to archive.ph or any other associated domains of archive.today. A lot of these archived links to such assets can be found here. Chipchip88 (talk) 01:55, 22 February 2026 (UTC)