Shoreshthe drift report · all case files
Case file

Al-Suyuti

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “son of a turkish slave woman”. Today it says “egyptian sunni muslim polymath of persian descent”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2005 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2005

Jalal-ud-din Abd-ur-Rahman bin Abu Bakr As-Suyuti ( 1445 - 1505 ), Arabian encyclopaedic writer, was the son of a Turkish slave woman. His father, who was of Persian descent, had been cadi in Asyut ( Upper Egypt ) and professor in Cairo , but died before his son was six years old. The boy's training was taken in hand by a Sufi friend of the father. He was precocious and is said to have known the Qur'an by heart before he was eight years old. In 1462 he was already a teacher; in 1464 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca ; in 1472 he became a professor, and in 1486 was promoted to a chair in the mosque of Baybars . Here, however, he provoked a revolt among the students and in 1501 was discharged for maladministration of trust funds. Two years later he was offered the same post again, but declined, and worked in seclusion at Rawda , an island of the Nile , and there died. He was one of the most prolific writers of the East, though many of his works are only pamphlets and some are mere abridgments of the work of others. We know of 561 separate titles of his works, and over 316 exist in manuscript. A list of these is given in C Brockelmann's Gesch. der Arabischen Litteratur , ii. 144-158 (Berlin, 1902). They deal with almost every branch of Moslem science and literature. Among the best known are the Itqan fi 'Ulum al-Quran (on the exegetic sciences of the Qur'an), published with an analysis by A Sprenger (Calcutta, 1852-1854) and often in Cairo; the commentary on the Qur'an, known as the Tafsir ul-Jalalain , begun by Jalal ud-Din ul-Mahalli (1389-1459) and finished by Suyuti, published often in the East; and the history of the caliphs , published at Calcutta (1858) and elsewhere.1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 16211839.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “son of a turkish slave woman”. Today it says “egyptian sunni muslim polymath of persian descent”. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2005, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

son of a turkish slave woman

Now

egyptian sunni muslim polymath of persian descent

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

← back to the drift report