Comment by toomuchtodo

14 hours ago

Archive.org is the archiver, rotted links are replaced by Archive.org links with a bot.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot

https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot

Yeah for historical links it makes sense to fall back on IAs existing archives, but going forward Wikipedia could take their own snapshots of cited pages and substitute them in if/when the original rots. It would be more reliable than hoping IA grabbed it.