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Case file

Alaa Abd El-Fattah

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “prominent egyptian blogger”. Today it says “egyptian-british software developer”.
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 October 6, 2023 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 October 6, 2023

Alaa Ahmed Seif Abd-El Fattah ( , ; born 18 November 1981), known professionally as Alaa Abd El-Fattah ( ), is an Egyptian-British blogger , software developer and a political activist .1 He has been active in developing Arabic-language versions of software and platforms. He was imprisoned in Egypt for allegedly organising a political protest without requesting authorization, though he was released on bail on 23 March 2014.2 He was rearrested and ordered released on bail again on 15 September 2014, subsequently sentenced to a month of jail in absentia, and received a five-year sentence in February 2015, which he was released from in late March 2019.3 Abd El-Fattah remained subject to a five-year parole period, requiring him to stay at a police station for 12 hours daily, from evening until morning.4 On 29 September, during the 2019 Egyptian protests , Abd El-Fattah was arrested by the National Security Agency and taken to State Security Prosecution on charges that were unknown as of 29 September 2019 .5 He was subsequently convicted of "spreading fake news" and jailed for five years. In April 2022 he began a hunger strike .

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 1177370463.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “prominent egyptian blogger”. Today it says “egyptian-british software developer”. Read the current article and compare.
201020152020Oct '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 2010, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

prominent egyptian blogger

Now

egyptian-british software developer

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.

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