Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?
First off, Wikipedia's articles that rely on mainstream news outlets are the worst articles. The editors specifically blacklist any outlet that doesn't match their systemic bias, and then they aggressively demolish paywalls in order to cram gossip and half-truths into their articles.
So Wikipedia and the WMF are projects which rely on copyright to exist. Their Creative Commons licensing is a shining beacon of liberty and the best complement to F/OSS such as MIT, GNU, and Apache. The WMF relies on generous donors, and their projects rely on tireless volunteers to keep the gears turning in there. The Commons are free because they are protected by international law, and respected by the Internet community.
But ironically, the "Internet archives" they rely on to preserve "reliable sources" are the antithesis of this. How would Wikipedia/WMF feel if their donations were robbed, and their volunteers uncredited? How would they feel if their websites and resources were weaponized against the laws and institutions which had built them? All these archive sites simply scrape away the funding sources and context for attribution. Newspapers and TV news aren't dying because of archive.org, but they sure ain't helping the situation.
Wikipedia pro-actively ensures that sources are scraped and archived. There are bots which go and check references. If any are dead, the bots find archived versions, and slot them in. If the link is not yet dead, the bots initiate requests to archive them ASAP. The Wikipedia community has established consensus to endorse this constant archiving activity as an integral part of the project, despite the 3rd-party nature operating in the shadows.
This particular beef of doxxing attempts and weird custom DDoS attempts is passing strange. Is this random civilian blogger heroic or righteous in a quest to uncover and reveal someone else's identity? Is the "archive" righteous to ... weaponize its own queries against some random civilian's website? Did we really expect any ethical behavior from either side in this melee?
Google and the archives are being used as a cudgel against copyright holders. Wikipedia has quietly stood behind these scrapers and cheered them on, as they chip away at the meaning of copyright itself. If information wants to be free, then Wikipedia must hold its Creative Commons licensing in contempt.
Wikipedia has huge verifiability problems. Many of their "best articles" have come to rely chiefly on "offline sources" also known as "dead trees in libraries and bookstores". The other articles rely on "paywalled sources". Headlines are not reliable but quoted. Errata are published but unnoticed.
You would need to be a wealthy billionaire to begin verifying half of the citations in Wikipedia today. You would maintain hundreds of subscriptions, proximity to comprehensive libraries, and own out-of-print volumes such as are not found in Google Books or amazon.com. And I suspect that you would find huge discrepancies between what the Wiki articles say and what the sources support!
