DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder’s identity in 2023. […] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:
By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger’s URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.
It would be pretty incredible if the Wikimedia Foundation started a project to archive the web
I think that’d go pretty far beyond Wikimedia’s mandate, but having something whose purpose was specifically archiving just the sources for their articles would be pretty awesome.
It supports the goal of free knowledge, so I think it wouldn’t veer far off its mission
You’re misinterpreting what Wikimedia’s “free knowledge” mandate is about. They have a hard-line requirement that the knowlege they distribute is legally free, for example - it has to be under an open license. archive.today is quite the opposite of that. They don’t just archive any old knowledge willy-nilly, they’ve got standards. And so forth.
Simply running an archive.today clone would not fit. The “source documents only” archive would already be stretching the edges rather far. There’s already Wikisource, for example, and it’s got the “open licenses only” restriction.
Wikimedia is an American organisation. In an America where legality is thrown out the window regularly, where foundational laws (e.g. murder, the constitution, etc) clearly no longer matter for the ruling party and vast swathes of people that follow them, what is legally free now?
I understand your point, I just think this is something to ponder. Is the free knowledge part more, or less, important than the legal part of their goal? Does the legal part truly matter any more?
Archived pages wouldn’t necessarily be the knowledge they distribute, just ways to verify the knowledge they distribute is correct. Content from The Wikipedia Library (which provides access to academia) isn’t relicensed at all, for example. Such a service would be a project but not a sister project like Wikisource is,
To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.