Is it really an “unreliable source”, though? The owner of the site is acting maliciously with regards to this DDOS, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to act maliciously about the contents of archive.today itself.

One could make the case that the owner of archive.today was already flagrantly flouting copyright law, and therefore a criminal, and therefore “unreliable” right from the get-go. Let’s not leap to conclusions here.

I don’t really see it as a complicated issue.

That makes sense from (what I think is) an “outsider’s” perspective. From an “insider’s” perspective*, here’s the problem:

• Wikipedia has a strict verifiability policy.
  • This policy states that “Each fact or claim in an article must [correspond to reliable sources]”.
  • This policy is the bedrock of Wikipedia. The project is fundamentally unsustainable without it, and we’re still undoing damage from decades ago when the policy either didn’t exist or was too loosely enforced.
  • I’m making a third bullet point because I cannot emphasize enough how much “just ignore it lol” cannot work and has never worked.
• Hundreds of thousands of articles have citations sourced to archive.today.
  • This is despite the fact that the Internet Archive is prioritized whenever possible. We even have a prolific Internet Archive bot that (when possible) automatically recovers citations.
  • The Interrnet Archive complies with blanket takedown requests of a domain very easily. Even if we ignore the ones going forward because now both resources are unreliable, archive.today would have untold millions of webpages archived which the IA does not – many of which are used on Wikipedia.
  • Archive.today will archive material that the Internet Archive will simply fail to archive because, on a technical level, it’s just better at capturing a static snap of an article (which is what we want). It’s especially true for paywalled articles, which the Wayback Machine is often stymied by.
• This would also make the Internet Archive the only remaining avenue for archiving URLs, meaning Wikipedia effectively collapses if something happens to the IA (granted that’d already be catastrophic with archive.today, much moreso than archive.today’s hypothetical removal).
• Archiving URLs isn’t just some incidental thing.
  • Citations are the backbone of Wikipedia. Casual readers might find them comforting to have. Researchers will rely on them. But editors cannot operate without them. We might actually use them more than readers do, because they help us a) check what’s already there, b) better understand the subject ourselves, and c) expand out the article.
  • Link rot is so much more pervasive than I think people fully grasp. When I’m writing an article, if possible, I archive every single source I use at both the Wayback Machine and archive.today, because relying on the link staying up is objectively a mistake (and relying on just one is negligent).
  • The security that archives offer generally just incalculably reduces the workload and mental load for editors.

If you’ve ever tried to add a citation on Wikipedia to a sentence that says “citation needed”, you’ve rubbed up against Brandolini’s law. A corollary is that it’s much, much harder to cite an uncited statement than it is to create one. If you remove archive.today, you flood Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of these. It’s dampened a bit by the fact that the citation metadata is still there and that some URLs will still be live, but I cannot emphasize – as an editor of nearly 10 years, with over 25,000 contributions, and who’s authored two featured articles – that you’d introduce a workload that could never be done, whose repurcussions would be felt for decades at a time when Wikipedia is already on shaky footing.

Even if you somehow poofed away all that work, there are bound to be tens of thousands of statements in articles you have to get rid of because they simply cannot be reasonably sourced anywhere else. For many, many statements, this is not incidental information independent from the rest of the article; many of these removals would require you to fundamentally restructure the surrounding prose or even the entire article.

It’s hard for me to explain that you just have to “trust me bro” that those people voting “Option C” take what archive.today did very seriously and recognize that either option is going to mean major, irreparable damage to the project. Wikipedia is a lot different from the editing side than it is on the reading one; sometimes it’s liberating, sometimes it’s horrifying, and in this case it’s “I could use a hug”.

* “Outsider” and “insider” used to denote experience editing; most anyone can do anything on Wikipedia from the get-go.