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Case file

Urbicide

In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “term which”. Today it says “term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city”.
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 2025 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 2025

Violence against a city Not to be confused with Herbicide . The city of Ypres during World War I Urbicide is a term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city, by direct or indirect means. It literally translates as "city-killing" ( Latin urbs "city" + Latin occido "to kill"). The term was initially used by urban planners and architects to describe 20th century practices of urban restructuring in the United States. Writers like Ada Louise Huxtable and Marshall Berman highlighted the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience. Especially after the siege of Sarajevo , the term has increasingly been used to describe violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. At the conclusion of the Yugoslav Wars , urbicide began to emerge as a distinct legal concept in international law. The exact constraints and definition of this term continues to be debated, and because the study of urbicide intersects with a number of disciplines including international politics , anthropology , and sociology , it has been difficult for scholars and policymakers to set a definition which satisfies all these fields. The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization and urbanization , and although the scholarly focus on systematic violence and destruction in the context of the city is relatively new, the practice of urbicide is thousands of years old.

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 1297060267.
Today
In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “term which”. Today it says “term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city”. 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

term which

Now

term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city

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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