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Case file

Yuval Noah Harari

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “israeli historian and the author of the international bestseller sapiens”. Today it says “israeli medievalist”. The one-line description Wikipedia serves to search engines and AI systems read “Israeli historian, philosopher, and author of popular science bestsellers”. It now reads “Israeli historian and philosopher (born 1976)”.
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

Yuval Noah Harari ( Hebrew : יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi] ; born 1976) is an Israeli medievalist , military historian , public intellectual , and popular science writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . His first bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. His other works include the bestsellers Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will , consciousness , intelligence, happiness, suffering and the role of storytelling in human evolution. In Sapiens , Harari writes about a " cognitive revolution " that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo , developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators , aided by the First Agricultural Revolution and accelerated by the Scientific Revolution , which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. Furthermore, he examines the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, " Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so". "Beware the AI bureaucrats: It's not killer robots we should be worried about, but the automated plumbers of the information network" .

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 1297068048.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “israeli historian and the author of the international bestseller sapiens”. Today it says “israeli medievalist”. The one-line description Wikipedia serves to search engines and AI systems read “Israeli historian, philosopher, and author of popular science bestsellers”. It now reads “Israeli historian and philosopher (born 1976)”. Read the current article and compare.
20152020Oct '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 2015, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

israeli historian and the author of the international bestseller sapiens

Now

israeli medievalist

Sections that no longer exist

Present on October 6, 2023, absent today, with no near-matching heading in the current article and the article shorter overall, so this is not a renamed heading or a topic absorbed into a fuller treatment. 1 section of 400 characters or more gone since October 6 2023, with the article 553 characters shorter.

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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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