Post by @legoktm@wikis.world

New blog post: Proposal for a dedicated archive site for #Wikipedia

https://blog.legoktm.com/2026/08/28/proposal-for-a-dedicated-archive-site-for-wikipedia.html

In February when English Wikipedia banned usage of archive.today there was a bit of a crisis in needing to find alternative archives.

As far as I know, no solution has actually materialized, so I thought I'd at least write down my idea.

In short, I think the social and legal parts of this are far harder to get right; in comparison the technology seems pretty straightforward.

Proposal for a dedicated archive site for Wikipedia - The Lego Mirror

In February when English Wikipedia (and a few months later, all of Wikimedia) banned usage of archive.today (aka archive.is), there was a bit of a crisis in needing to find alternative archives. For reasons, archive.today was especially good at archiving some difficult websites that weren't available in the Wayback Machine.…

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Kunal Mehta

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aismallard

@aismallard@woem.space 23 min. ago

@legoktm

they’d only be able to do so by actually contributing to Wikipedia, so… still a win.

True, but there are ways to rack up edits without contributing anything meaningful (e.g. messing around in userspace, changing small things then reverting, etc.) There should be some kind of toll system, but I am unsold on edits being the mechanism.

Kunal Mehta

@legoktm@wikis.world 18 min. ago

@aismallard I think that's workable by making the definition e.g. "non-reverted mainspace" commits or something. Maybe the edits need to "ripen" (i.e. give it time to show the edits won't be reverted). I'm sure there are other constraints we could come up with to strengthen it.

And I think the definition can change over time so it doesn't need to be perfect when we launch, just enough of a roadblock that people don't immediately think of it when they need to bypass a paywall.