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Comment by Andoryuuta | Hacker News Reader

Oh! To be entirely honest, I got the link directly from a reference on a Wikipedia page, so I assumed the old link must be down since it was using archive.org.

With that being said, the archive.org link is probably better in case anyone comes across this HN discussion in the future.

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We ask people not to submit archive links* because it's important for readers to see the original provenance of the article, e.g. in the site name displayed to the right of the title.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* If the original article is really not available anywhere else on the web and is interesting enough for a good HN thread, posting archive.org is ok.

Noted. Thanks for updating the link!

I think Wikipedia references are encouraged to use archive links because it will show the page at the time that they used it as a reference as opposed to linking to the live page which can change at any time.

Wikipedia references should include both the live url and the archive url, and then set the “dead” flag to either true or false to choose which url to link to. Probably either an automated process or an inattentive user falsely marked the url as dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem links both to the live page and to the archived copy (in that order).

Linking only to an archived copy when the original is still live would be unusual.

Wikipedia has been around long enough that many of the citation links pointing to other websites are broken. So there are several wiki bots that go around replacing direct links with links to the archived pages.

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