Re:Spain Orders Blocks on Archive.today and Its Mirrors
by FreelanceWriter on Saturday September 26, 2026 @11:46AM
(#49857628)
Given Wikipedia’s decline—people are reading AI-generated answers instead of Wikipedia, and they certainly aren’t clicking on the archived links in the articles’ references—and the rising cost of equipment, what do you see as the motivation for the archive to continue sponsoring Wikipedia in this risky way, which exposes the copyright issues far beyond niche communities like HN? The form of attention, that Wikipedia brings back (FBI, Finnish "bloggers" from WikiTravel, ...) is certainly undesirable, and no one would want to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Re:Spain Orders Blocks on Archive.today and Its Mirrors
by dudisubekti on Monday September 28, 2026 @03:00AM
(#49874517)
The archive guy actually called Wikipedia on this lol.
Like if a very infamous site, KiwiFarms can have their own archiving engine, why cant multimillion dollar site like Wikipedia can't? He's absolutely correct that Wikipedia is a freeloader that doesnt want to deal with copyright.
However, I'm not sure if the archive guy is paying it out of his own pocket. It's a massive ad-free site servicing tons of requests everyday, and it has a very impressive technical abilities.
That has to be quite expensive, like he must've some seriously rich sponsors. And his sponsors might be okay with Wikipedia using the site, but this is all just my guess lol.
In the end, it's also perfectly valid for him to refuse servicing Wikipedia: it's his site.
But despite this I feel like what he did was very counterproductive to this goal. If he did nothing, people would just forget about it. Wikipedia would still use his service because they don't want to deal with copyright.
Besides if western intelligence really wants to find this guy, they could probably do it without the journalist's help.