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Case file

Hasan Karmi

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “distinguished palestinian linguist”. Today it says “palestinian linguist and broadcaster for the bbc arabic service”.
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 2020 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 2020

Hasan Sa'id Karmi ( , 1905 – May 5, 2007) was a Palestinian linguist and broadcaster.1 Hasan Karmi was born in Tulkarm , Palestine . The son of a sharia court judge, Sheikh Sa'id al-Karmi, Karmi studied in a local Qur'anic school and later attended English College in Jerusalem. He joined the British mandate government's education department and won two scholarships, in 1939 and 1945, to study at the Institute of Education in London. Karmi and his family were forced to flee in the 1948 Nakba . They eventually settled in the neighbourhood of Golders Green , in London , England . Karmi joined the BBC Arabic Service and served as a broadcaster for nearly 40 years. He was the creator, writer, and presenter of a weekly literary program called Qawlun ala Qawl (Saying on a Saying) devoted to Arabic poetry and proverbs. The program was the longest running in the history of the BBC Arabic Service. In 1969 Karmi was awarded an MBE for services to the BBC. Karmi was married to a Syrian woman, Amina, had one son, Ziyad, and two daughters, Siham and Ghada Karmi . He returned to the Middle East, to Jordan, in 1989 and spent his remaining years working on eleven dictionaries, one Arabic-English, the rest English-Arabic.2

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 935065612.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “distinguished palestinian linguist”. Today it says “palestinian linguist and broadcaster for the bbc arabic service”. 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

distinguished palestinian linguist

Now

palestinian linguist and broadcaster for the bbc arabic service

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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