The Wikipedia Audit · original research
They are deleting what happened, one word at a time.
We hold twenty years of Wikipedia’s Israel, Jewish and Islam articles, snapshot by snapshot, and we count what its editors take out. Every claim on this site links the exact revision it came from. Every number recomputes from public data.
61,944
Wikipedia articles about Israel, the Jewish people and Islam that we watch, chosen from the encyclopedia’s own lists rather than by us
7
times we saved the opening of every one of those articles, from 2005 to this month, so we can read what it used to say
28,551
changes we found in them: a word for what happened deleted, a subject redefined, a section gone. Each one carries the old text, the new text and the edit that did it
21,672
of those articles have been changed in at least one of those ways
Exhibit A · check it yourself in ten seconds
Samir Kuntar, the one line Wikipedia serves to every search engine
He beat a four-year-old girl to death with a rifle butt and was convicted of murder and terrorism. The conviction now survives only inside the article, never in the line search engines and language models quote.
The case file holds every version since 2005.
3.05×
Articles about attacks on Israelis and articles about attacks by Israelis lost the words naming the attacker at the same rate, 16.02% against 15.52%. But articles about Israeli actions gained the words apartheid, genocide and war crime 3.05 times as often. The encyclopedia softens evenly and accuses in one direction.
4,921
article openings have had one of 25 tracked words taken out of them. Most were not deleted but moved down the page, out of the part search engines quote and language models read.
119/yr
article openings losing the word “terror” every year since October 7, up from 29/year in the late 2000s. The fastest removal rate in the record.
4,895
of those removals are still gone today, twenty years on. 26 ever came back.