edit: adjusted title slightly
Ok, serious question. Why is it normally read/write? I’ve always treated it as being read only.
You can (well, could) put in any live URL there and IA would take a snapshot of the current page on your request. They also actively crawl the web and take new snapshots on their own. All of that counts as ‘writing’ to the database.
Not just websites. Basically any digital media. From PDFs, book scans, manuals, floppy disks, CDs, basically anything even remotely worth archiving
Yep, but I didn’t mention that because it’s not a part of the “Wayback Machine”, it’s just the general “Internet Archive” business of archiving media, which is for now still completely unavailable. (I’ve uploaded dozens of public-domain books there myself, and I’m really missing it…)