They are deleting what happened, one word at a time.

The three numbers that matter

What twenty years of saved Wikipedia openings come down to. Each one can be recomputed from the public data, and each is sized to screenshot.

The words Wikipedia is deleting

Start here, because this is the part that cannot be explained as coverage of new events. Below the line, in colour: article openings where editors took the word out. Above it, in grey: openings that gained it, which tracks new events getting written up. “Terror” was removed from 26 openings a year in the late 2000s. Since October 7 it is removed from 148 a year, the fastest rate in the record.

Every tracked word across Wikipedia, at a glance

Twenty years per line, per 100 article openings. Red lines are the accusation vocabulary; steel lines are the words used to describe the attackers. The dashed mark on each line is October 7, 2023, and the arrow is the change since that day.

One word, two histories

“Genocide” is two opposite signals wearing one word. Next to the Holocaust, Armenia or Rwanda it is the historical record, and removing it is denial. Next to Gaza and the ICJ case it is an accusation against Israel. Split by the context around each mention: the accusation appeared 8 times across the openings of all 61,944 watched articles on October 6, 2023, after eighteen years online. Twenty months later it appears 130 times. The historical line grew slowly for eighteen years. The accusation line was near zero until October 2023, then multiplied twenty-fold.

Counts are per 100 article openings among articles that existed at each date, so a growing encyclopedia cannot fake a trend by itself. The x axis follows real time, and the velocity bars are annualized as 1 − (1 − p)^1/years so unequal windows compare honestly. Recompute anything here from /data.

The Wikipedia articles born after October 7

4,533 of the articles we watch did not exist on October 6, 2023. They were created after, and their openings carry the accusation vocabulary at several times the rate of the 55,243 articles that were already there. Grey is the older articles, red is the ones born since. “Genocide” appears in 1.8% of the new openings against 0.4% of the old.

Share of openings containing the word at all, not total mentions, so a single long article cannot move the line. New articles cover new events, and some of this is that. The size of the gap is the finding.

Which words outran Wikipedia's own growth

Rates per article are one measure. Volume is another, and it answers a different question: how much of this vocabulary now sits in the encyclopedia at all. Since 2005 the watched set grew 9 times over. Mentions in their openings grew faster: genocide 28 times, apartheid 12, ethnic cleansing 10, war crime 9. A vocabulary outrunning the encyclopedia that carries it is not the encyclopedia getting bigger.

Total mentions across every saved opening at each date, and the multiple between them. Red bars grew faster than the article set itself; steel bars did not. Both measures are published because they answer different questions, and because a count that only ever runs one way is not a measurement.

Wikipedia changed what the thing is

Every Wikipedia article opens by defining its subject: X is a Y. That sentence is what Google quotes, what AI systems are trained on, and what a reader takes away if they read nothing else. It is also the one sentence that can be replaced without deleting a word from anybody's watch list, which is exactly why nobody was counting it. We reconstructed it from every snapshot we hold, back to 2005. 18,589 Wikipedia articles now define their subject as something other than what Wikipedia said it was, 5,335 of them since October 2023.

A translator Israel assassinated is now a translator. A hijacking is now a scheduled flight from Cairo to San Diego. Counter-terrorism units are now certain units. Nothing was deleted from any article to do it.

The last two run the other way, and they stay on this page for the same reason every number here does: a measurement that only ever finds what we went looking for is worth nothing to anyone.

Words Wikipedia deleted and never put back

A word that was already removed before you started watching is invisible, so we went back through twenty years of revision history for every article. 3,676 Wikipedia openings used a tracked word at some point since 2005 and no longer use it. Every claim below links the old revision, and we saved that text ourselves. We count both directions: “occupation” and “apartheid” erasures are in the data beside “terror” and “antisemitism”.

Every deletion, by word

The opening paragraph is the only part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote. Every verdict was checked against the full current article text, references included, on 2026-08-02, and the check reruns on a schedule so the “today” column never goes stale.