Shoresh
Menu
Case file

Israel Zangwill

In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “british-born zionist and writer”. Today it says “british author at the forefront of zionism during the late 19th century”. 3 sections present on 6 October 2023 are absent today.
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

His early life was spent in the East End of London , and he was a teacher in the Jewish Free School there. In later life, his friends included Jerome K. He wrote a very influential novel Children of the Ghetto ( 1892 ), and his play The Melting Pot was a hit in the USA in 1908 - 1909 . He also wrote mystery works, such as The Big Bow Mystery . However, he is best known for coining the slogan, "a land without people for a people without land" to describe the nation that is now Israel . Zangwill, a British Jew , founded an organization called the Jewish Territorialist Organization in 1905 . The aim of the Jewish Territorialist Organization was to create a Jewish homeland in whatever possible territory in the world (and not necessarily in what today is the state of Israel ). Zangwill died in 1926 after trying to create the Jewish state in such diverse places as Canada , Australia , Mesopotamia , Uganda and Cyrenaica . Israel Zangwill was the father of Oliver L. Zangwill , a prominent British psychologist .1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 16251911.
Today
In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “british-born zionist and writer”. Today it says “british author at the forefront of zionism during the late 19th century”. 3 sections present on 6 October 2023 are absent today. 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

british-born zionist and writer

Now

british author at the forefront of zionism during the late 19th century

Sections that no longer exist

This section existed on October 6, 2023. It is gone today. The current article has no similar heading in its place, and the article is shorter overall. So this is not a heading that got renamed, and it is not a topic that got folded into a bigger section. 3 sections of 400 characters or more gone since October 6 2023, with the article 208 characters shorter.

  • Politics
  • Jewish politics
  • Quotes
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