> Why is it obvious why they tampered with old archives? Why did they tamper with old archives?

See section "Blog capture tampered with":

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

Also:

> On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned all links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with: Discussion had discovered that instances of Nora's name were replaced with Patokallio's and that "Nora" was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to a real person, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request.[18][17][19] The community's decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability—partly undermined by the discovery of the alterations— while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[18][20] Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova...

> Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision.

* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/wikiped...

"it's pretty obvious why" here refers to why Wikipedia would reject them as a source.

Looking for the answer to this myself as well. Seems like a bit of conjecture