It seems a lot of people havent heard of it, but I think its worth plugging https://perma.cc/ which is really the appropriate tool for something like Wikipedia to be using to archive pages.
The major reason archive.today was being used is that it also bypassed paywalls, and I don't think perma.cc does that normally.
With all of this context shared, the Internet Archive is likely meeting this need without issue, to the best of my knowledge.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
[2] https://perma.cc/about ("Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries. We’re both in the forever business: libraries already look after physical and digital materials — now we can do the same for links.")
[3] https://community.crossref.org/t/how-to-get-doi-for-our-jour...
[4] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#annual-membership-fees
[5] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#content-registration-fees
(no affiliation with any entity in scope for this thread)
If pricing is so much that you have to have a call with the marketing team to get a quote, i think it would be a poor use of WMF funds.
Especially because volume of links and number of users that wikimedia would entail is probably double their entire existing userbase at least.
Ultimately we are mostly talking about a largely static web host. With legal issues being perhaps the biggest concern. It would probably make more sense for WMF to create their own than to become a perma.cc subscriber.
However for the most part, partnering with archive.org seems to be going well and already has some software integration with wikipedia.
https://wikimediaendowment.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annua...
https://www.in.gov/nircc/planning/highway/traffic-data/inter...
and reddit blocks their agent seemingly. It is open source though.
Shortcut is to consume the Wikimedia changelog firehose and make these http requests yourself, performing a CDX lookup request to see if a recent snapshot was already taken before issuing a capture request (to be polite to the capture worker queue).
You can see a text box for it on the right, if you go on the waybackmachine's homepage. I used it yesterday.
Anyone can request anything be removed and they may honor the request: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som... they say nothing about only removing things illegal in the US or anything like that, meaning they can and will remove things based on personal judgements about whether it should be archived.
I hope so. Archiving is a legal landmine.
> Bypassing paywalls would be playing with fire though.
That's the only reason archive.today was used. For non-paywalled stuff you can use the wayback machine.