this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I think the future of wikipedia looks a bit bleak if they drop archive.today now. They need a decent archiver to function. Internet archive is good but its a single group hosted in the US, plus any site with a paywall isn't surviving on the internet archive very well.
They've needed good alternative for awhile and the need is just growing. I wish public libraries could fill the gap but its probably not realistic. We've had legal deposit requirements for non-print media in various jurisdictions for awhile but i'm doubtful how effective it is, nor is it convenient to access or use for wikipedia.
To be fair Wayback Machine is not the only option, there are at least 3 other Internet archival services besides archive.today:
Unfortunately their scrapers are nearly not as developed as Wayback Machine's and archive.today's are (Ghostarchive and Megalodon can't bypass Anubis/Cloudflare check, for example). Ghostarchive is neat when it works because of very high-fidelity captures (even more high-fidelity than archive.today's captures are), but only something like ~75% of everything I've ever archived there works. Oh, and it can also archive short (<10 min) YouTube videos with low/average bitrate.
Megalodon is pretty much useless for Wikipedia because it doesn't work with, like, half of all online news websites.
I haven't archived anything on Etched yet, but their premise of "archiving a web page forever on bitcoin" doesn't seem attractive so I probably won't use it.
Very True, I have had some good use out of ghostarchive. When it works. There's also self-hosted options like archivebox. And Several paid solutions like perma.cc. Kiwix/Zim too although that's focused on wiki's themselves & offline storage/access so not as useful for sources. But yes I've found none get consistantly good archives as much as archive.org or archive.today.
I have not heard of etched, but I do tend to avoid a lot of the crypto stuff.
Its also concerning if any of the archives suddenly going down & the data isn't backed up. I know the storage requirements alone makes good backups unlikely, but with archive.today looking so volitile I wonder if one's going to be needed.
Edit: added links & spelling