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archiveteam.org is wiki-like website created by (and named after) the Archive Team, a loose, almost anarchical collection of programmers with the singular intent of preserving internet history.

Their website, though being technically a wiki, serves as more of a group blog and record of their activities. In it you will find entries about individual websites, those entries will inform you of the basic aspects of the website, its activity and vital sings, and go into detail about their plan and efforts to archive the site. You will also find that it's very informally written and very Snarky — not that this is unheard of among wikis (and especially among those that are written as group blogs), of course, but still, considering the site's purpose and subject matter, this is still quite jarring, jarring enough for them to get their own page here(!), in fact.

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Aside from the Snark, though, you will also find that there are two pages that are arguably one of, if not the most important pages of the website: The Deathwatch page and the Alive... OR ARE THEY page.note 

The "Deathwatch" page lists, as you'd expect, sites that are giving out their final breaths and should be archived immediately. The page also contains a list of major events on the internet that, on one way or another, involved the loss of content and information. For example, the shutdown of Orkut and Vine, the removal of Leelah Alcorn's tumblr account and other forms of online presence, and Encyclopedia Dramatica's transformation into Oh, Internet! are all part of that list, along with a certain biting, snide wit that can be observed in entries like "Nokia Memories is forgotten" or "Inkblazers is now Inkerasers".

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The "Alive... OR ARE THEY" page, on the other hand, contains three lists: One of sites that can become endangered at any moment, one of sites that, while far from being under any threat, still contain information that is too valuable to be lost, and another one of sites that, while not under immediate danger, may still disappear within long term future. Let it be noted that our own wiki is part of that second list.

In order to archive websites, the Archive Team uses an appliance called "warrior", it can be downloaded by members and volunteers and used to download websites and upload them on Archive Team's archive, usually so they can be later uploaded on the Internet Archive in WARC format. We're telling you this because, if you came here from the Web Comics page, this is the information you're looking for, this is how you'll save those comics. Now go contact these guys and get to work!

You can view Archive Team's famed collection on the IA by clicking here. You can also view a list of their past, present, proposed, and cancelled projects by clicking here.

You can also see their subreddit and official Twitter account, respectively, here and here. Their IRC channels can also be found here.


The Archive Team wiki provides examples of:

  • April Fools: Averted in this tweet from the group's (and by extension, the wiki's) official Twitter account:
    "We were going to do a number of April Fool's jokes, but then we realized there's too much crazy shutdowns happening. THEY're the joke."
  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: The "Philosophy" page, which explains the underpinnings of AT's work, is written in first person by the team's founder, Jason Scott himself, and in it, when he states that he is the "Editor in Chief" i.e. the person overseeing the direction and motivations of the wiki, there's a footnote that says the following:
    "This means it's my fault."
  • Deadpan Snarker: As noted above, the Archive Team wiki contains, surprisingly enough, a rather large amount of humorous and sarcastic text despite it being a group blog for a website archiving organization. This can, for example, be observed in their "Deathwatch" and "Alive... OR ARE THEY" lists as well as their IRC channels (see Just for Pun below).
  • Heroic Fire Rescue: The logo for their "Warrior" program (which, naturally, can be seen several times the program's page on the wiki) decipts a man rescuing documents from a burning archive. They actually even state that this is what the man in the logo is doing on the page's FAQ section.
  • Just for Pun: Each project listed on the wiki has a channel on IRC, since it's through this service that the "Warrior" bots detect and carry out ongoing projects. However, instead of simply naming these channels "#[name of the site]project", they choose to follow an unwritten rule to be a little more creative with the names. For example:

Sites (and other stuff) they've archived:


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