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Sidney Lee

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “english biographer and critic”. Today it says “english biographer”. The one-line description Wikipedia serves to search engines and AI systems read “19th/20th-century English biographer and critic”. It now reads “English biographer and critic (1859–1926)”.
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

Sidney Lee ( December 5 , 1859 - March 3 , 1926 ) was an English biographer and critic.1 He was born in London and educated at the City of London school and at Balliol College, Oxford , where he graduated in modern history in 1882 . In the next year he became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography . In 1890 he became joint editor, and on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891 succeeded him as editor. Lee himself contributed voluminously to the Dictionary , writing some 800 articles, mainly on Elizabethan authors or statesmen . While still at Balliol he had written two articles on Shakespearean questions, which were printed in The Gentleman's Magazine , and in 1884 he published a book about Stratford-on-Avon . His article on Shakespeare in the fifty-first volume ( 1897 ) of the Dictionary of National Biography formed the basis of his Life of William Shakespeare ( 1898 ), which reached its fifth edition in 1905 . In 1902 , Lee edited the Oxford facsimile edition of the first folio of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, followed in 1902 and 1904 by supplementary volumes giving details of extant copies, and in 1906 by a complete edition of Shakespeare's works. Lee received a knighthood in 1911 . Besides editions of English classics his works include a Life of Queen Victoria ( 1902 ), Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century ( 1904 ), based on his Lowell Institute lectures at Boston, Massachusetts , in 1903 , and Shakespeare and the Modern Stage ( 1906 ).2 Original text from 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica3

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 17885633.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “english biographer and critic”. Today it says “english biographer”. The one-line description Wikipedia serves to search engines and AI systems read “19th/20th-century English biographer and critic”. It now reads “English biographer and critic (1859–1926)”. 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

english biographer and critic

Now

english biographer

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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