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Masoretes

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “group of rabbis based primarily in tiberius who compiled a system of critical notes on the external form of the”. Today it says “groups of jewish scribe - scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries ad”.
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

Masoretes ( ba'alei masorah ) were a group of rabbis based primarily in Tiberius who compiled a system of critical notes on the external form of the Biblical text, and who effectively determined the precise text of the Tanakh in the Jewish community.1 See the article on the Masoretic text for a full discussion of their work.2 The Karaite ben Asher family is responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text, which all current Hebrew Bibles (reproductions of the text of the Torah excluding a Torah scroll ) are based upon. Their system of notes represents the literary labors of innumerable scholars, of which the beginning falls probably in pre- Maccabean times and the end reaches to the year 1425 CE.3 Additionally, The Masoretes devized the vowel notation system for Hebrew that is still widely used as well as the trope symbols used for cantillation .

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 16223661.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “group of rabbis based primarily in tiberius who compiled a system of critical notes on the external form of the”. Today it says “groups of jewish scribe - scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries ad”. 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

group of rabbis based primarily in tiberius who compiled a system of critical notes on the external form of the

Now

groups of jewish scribe - scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries ad

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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