original, saw this somewhere else too. ddos stuff. this one blames ru for archive.today mess. sounds about right. didn’ intend it to look like an announcement here. it kind of did. post based on ars story, apparently. who knows
There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
I’m still deciding how much I agree or disagree with this. It’s true that they do cite books which you often can’t read online, but adding information backed up by a paywalled proof feels a bit “trust me bro”. E.g. I could find/create a site with an impossibly large paywall and no-one would realistically able to check my sources.
There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
That’s good for you, and it is okay for you to use archive.today personally, as long as you block their DDoSing.
But Wikipedia does not need to bypass paywalls, and they don’t require the source to be freely (or easily) viewable to verify the info.
I’m still deciding how much I agree or disagree with this. It’s true that they do cite books which you often can’t read online, but adding information backed up by a paywalled proof feels a bit “trust me bro”. E.g. I could find/create a site with an impossibly large paywall and no-one would realistically able to check my sources.