What Wikipedia did to the conquest articles

We hold twenty years of openings for 61,944 Wikipedia articles about Israel, the Jewish people and Islam, sampled at seven dates from 2005 to this month. The caliphate and conquest cluster is inside that corpus, and it has been moving. This page is what the instrument found, with the revision id for every claim, so any of it can be checked against Wikipedia’s own history in one click.

Read the short description column first. That one line is the highest-reach text on any Wikipedia article: mobile prints it under the heading, search prints it beside every result, knowledge panels lift it, and a language model asked what something is will hand back that sentence almost verbatim. It carries no citation and needs no consensus to change.

The word that left the short descriptions

Article	The line search engines quote, then	And now
Early Muslim conquests	”Historical process in the 7th and 8th centuries CE"	"Expansion of the Islamic state (622-750)“
Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula	”8th century Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula"	"8th-century conquest by the Umayyads”
Muslim conquest of Persia	”7th-century conquest of the Sassanid Empire"	"Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of the Sasanian Empire”
Muslim conquest of the Maghreb	”Islamic conquests by the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates"	"Muslim conquests by the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates”

Two distinct moves, both in the same slot.

Conquest becomes expansion. A conquest has a victim. An expansion is something a balloon does. The article title still says conquest, so nothing was falsified; the line that travels no longer says it.

The religion becomes a dynasty. “Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula” retains its title, and its one-line summary now attributes the event to the Umayyads. Both are accurate. Only one of them tells a reader what kind of event it was, and the one that does is the one that got removed.

The definitions

The first sentence’s “is a” phrase is what the article says the subject is. Changing it is not an edit to a fact, it is an edit to the category the fact lives in.

Jizya, the tax on non-Muslims:

then: “per capita tax imposed on adult males of other faiths under Muslim rule” now: “type of taxation levied on non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law”

Rule became law. A relationship of domination became an administrative arrangement, and the reader who arrives now learns about a tax code rather than about a conquered population paying for the right to keep its religion.

Rashidun Caliphate:

then: “first caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad” now: “early Islamic polity led by the first four successive caliphs”

Abbasid Caliphate:

then: “dynastic name generally given to the caliphs of Baghdad” now: “third Islamic caliphate”

Dhimmi was redefined out of the frame it had held since 2005, which described a person living in a Muslim state as a member of an officially tolerated non-Islamic religion. Tolerated is the word that carried the meaning, because tolerance is granted by someone with the power to withdraw it.

The words that left the openings

Almohad Caliphate: the word jihad appeared in the opening in 2005. It is absent now. This is the dynasty that abolished dhimmi status outright and drove Maimonides out of Spain.
Caliphate: the word militant appeared in the opening in 2015 and is gone. The short description moved from “Islamic notion of political-religious authority” to “Islamic form of government”, which upgrades a claim to authority into an ordinary constitutional category.

The sections that stopped existing

Section loss only counts here when the heading has no near match anywhere in the article and the article got shorter, because a renamed heading is not a deleted topic. These pass both tests, all of them since 6 October 2023.

Caliphate lost six sections of 400 characters or more and 3,284 characters overall, among them Sokoto Caliphate (1804-1903), Bornu Caliphate (1472-1893), Islamic call, and Notable caliphs. The two African caliphates that ran on slave raiding into the twentieth century are the ones that stopped being sections.
List of caliphs lost the section “Islamic State (2014-present)”. The article whose entire purpose is to enumerate the holders of the office dropped the entry for the movement that most recently claimed it.
Mughal Empire is 10,452 characters shorter, losing Urbanization and Chemistry.
Ottoman Empire is 3,157 characters shorter and lost its Name section, and its opening gained an accusation word it did not carry on 6 October 2023.
Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent went from one accusation word in the opening to two over the same window.

What we are not claiming

Some of what the instrument catches in this cluster is housekeeping, and saying so is what makes the rest usable. The Umayyad Caliphate’s short description changed from “Second Islamic caliphate (661-750 CE)” to “Second Islamic caliphate (661-750)”. That is a date-format convention, not a finding, and it is in our data with a severity that reflects it.

We are also not claiming a conspiracy. Wikipedia has no editorial board, and no single person did this. What the corpus shows is a direction: across a cluster of articles about the same subject, edited by different people at different times, the words that name what happened to the conquered leave the highest-reach slots, and nothing moves the other way. One edit proves nothing. The direction is the finding.

Why this cluster matters more than most

Because these are the articles a language model reads when someone asks how Islam spread. There is no editor between the model and the short description, no talk page, no citation to weigh. The sentence in that slot is the answer the machine gives, and on four of the articles above that sentence no longer contains the word for what the event was.

Our own account is on How Islam spread, the caliphates one by one, and the ledger of every Muslim-majority country, each of them written to say the thing the short description stopped saying.

Sources

Our own analysis file, one row per article with every finding and its evidence, published as open data at ilroot.com/data under CC BY 4.0
The method: zones, reach, and how severity is computed
Every revision id above links Wikipedia’s own history for that article