This already happens. Every link added to Wikipedia is automatically archived on the wayback machine.
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replyIronic, I know. I couldn't find where I originally heard this years ago, but the InternetArchiveBot page linked above says "InternetArchiveBot monitors every Wikimedia wiki for new outgoing links" which is probably referring to what I said.
replyI didn't know you can just ask IA to grab a page before their crawler gets to it. In that case yeah it would make sense for Wikipedia to ping them automatically.
replyWhy wouldn't Wikipedia just capture and host this themselves? Surely it makes more sense to DIY than to rely on a third party.
replyWhy would they need to own the archive at all? The archive.org infrastructure is built to do this work already. It's outside of WMF's remit to internally archive all of the data it has links to.
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replySpammers and pirates just got super excited at that plan!
replyThere are various systems in place to defend against them, I recommend against this, poor form against a public good is not welcome.
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