Reach: the audit weighted by who actually reads it

Wikipedia’s WikiProject Palestine tracks 1,000 articles, and its own monthly report says they took 17,476,842 views in June 2026. Of the hundred most-read, 68 carry a finding in our ledger. Those 68 account for 5,299,038 of the hundred’s 6,896,290 monthly views. Seventy-seven per cent of everything read at the top of this topic is being read off an article we have already caught moving. Not a sample of obscure pages. The centre of the map.

Everything else on this site measures the record. The method explains how a change is caught, the twenty-year audit shows the direction of travel, and the ledger lists the edits one by one. None of them weights a finding by how many people meet it. A word removed from an article 400 people open a month and the same word removed from the article 300,000 people open a month are not the same event, and Wikipedia publishes the numbers that tell you which is which.

The numbers, from their own report

Slice of WikiProject Palestine	Articles	Carrying findings	Monthly views, June 2026	Views on articles carrying findings
The 100 most-read	100	68	6,896,290	5,299,038 (77%)
The full project list	1,000	504	17,476,842	9,313,558

Half the list by article count. Considerably more than half of it by readership. The findings concentrate exactly where the traffic is, which is what you would expect if the editing follows attention, and not what you would expect from a noisy instrument scattering hits at random across a thousand pages.

The rest of this page is the confirmed evidence, ordered by reach rather than by article. The one-line description first, because it is the highest-reach text on the internet’s most-quoted reference work, then the defining sentence, then the opening, then the parts of the page most readers never arrive at.

The one line, reach 1.00

The short description is what mobile prints under the heading, what search prints beside the result, what a knowledge panel lifts, and what a language model hands back when someone asks what a thing is. It carries no citation. It needs no consensus to change.

Palestine: state became country

then: {{Short description|State in West Asia}} now: {{Short description|Country in West Asia}}

Changed at revision 1214472630, 19 March 2024, under the edit summary “edit to reflect previous edit of mine”. The previous edit, revision 1214305227 the day before, had changed the defining sentence from “is a state in the Southern Levant region of West Asia” to “is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia”, under this summary:

“the state of palestine is a country the same way taiwan is. it has a functioning government and functions just like a country with sovereign borders (west bank). please revert if this change is a bad change.”

One editor, one analogy, no source, and a self-flagged request to be reverted if it was wrong. It was not reverted. It is still live at revision 1369264522. A reader whose only exposure is a search result can no longer learn that Palestinian statehood is a contested legal claim rather than a settled fact.

Six-Day War: the belligerents dropped out

then: {{Short description|1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria}} now: {{Short description|1967 war between Israel and Arab states}}

The “then” is revision 1178594891, the text live on 6 October 2023. The “now” is revision 1366291213, unchanged in the current revision 1368366529. Three named states replaced by a collective noun.

The asymmetry is what makes this usable. The first sentence of that same revision still says “primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan”. The specificity survives where readers scroll and dies where they do not.

The defining sentence, reach 0.95

The “is a” phrase is not a fact about the subject. It is the category the facts live in.

Zionism

then, revision 9034353, 30 December 2004: “Zionism is a political movement among Jews (although supported by some non-Jews) which maintains that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland.” now, revision 1366662290: “Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history.”

The claim that defines the subject, that the Jewish people are a nation entitled to a national homeland, is gone from the sentence that defines the subject. What replaces it tells the reader Zionism is a European movement whose method was colonization.

The same lead runs an attribution flip backwards. On revision 1177123269, the last revision before 7 October 2023, the opening held the charge as one side’s characterisation:

“Advocates of Zionism view it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of a persecuted people to its ancestral homeland. Critics of Zionism view it as a colonialist, racist, or exceptionalist ideology or movement.”

Today the word arrives in Wikipedia’s own first sentence, and the attributed version follows it:

“Opponents of Zionism often characterize it as a supremacist, colonialist, or racist ideology, or as a settler colonialist movement.”

One accusation word in that opening in September 2023, inside the attributed sentence. Four today, one of them in the definition. A reader can no longer tell that calling Zionism colonial is an argument rather than a description.

Hamas

then, revision 17831504, 29 June 2005: “Hamas, acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (Arabic: Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is also Arabic for ‘zeal’ or ‘courage’) is a Palestinian Islamist militant organization closely related to the Muslim Brotherhood.” now, revision 1369342562: “The Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated Hamas, is a Sunni Islamist Palestinian nationalist political organisation with a military wing known as the al-Qassam Brigades.”

In 2005 the word militant sat inside the “is a” phrase, wikilinked to the list of militant organisations. Today the defining sentence says Hamas is a political organisation that has a military wing, which files the armed activity as a department rather than as what the subject is. The Muslim Brotherhood connection left the definition too; it now appears in the second paragraph as a charity affiliation.

The opening, reach 0.80

What a search result quotes, and what most readers read all of.

Israel: fourteen months from who is accusing to what happened

The clearest single sequence in the corpus, because the intermediate step is on the record.

5 October 2023, revision 1178754834: “Israel’s practices in its occupation of the Palestinian territories, the longest military occupation in modern history, have drawn international condemnation for violating the human rights of the Palestinians, including accusations of apartheid.” 29 June 2025, revision 1297914598: “along with accusations that it has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Palestinian people, from human-rights organisations and UN officials” Today, revision 1366794219: “Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories has drawn international criticism, with most Middle East experts arguing that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank in relation to Israeli settlers constitutes a system of apartheid. After the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

In 2025 genocide was an accusation with named accusers. Fourteen months later it is a sentence the encyclopedia says in its own voice, and occupation arrives pre-judged as illegal rather than attributed to any legal finding. The accusation vocabulary in that opening goes from five distinct terms to six, and six is a floor: the declarative genocide sentence sits inside a multi-source reference block that a plain-text pass does not see, so the prose carries more than the counter reports. In the October 2023 lead the only instance of the word genocide anywhere was a book title inside a citation.

The passage is guarded. The wikitext carries an inline editor’s note:

“Do not change without Talk. The text below reflects the following RFC and other talk discussions: [[Talk:Israel/Archive 111#RfC: Whether to state that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians]]”

The same opening lost the other side of its own sentence:

then, revision 1297914598: “However, efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after the interim Oslo Accords have not succeeded, and the country has engaged in several wars and clashes with Palestinian militant groups.” now, revision 1366794219: “The 1993 Oslo Accords introduced limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, while the 2020 Abraham Accords normalised ties with more Arab states, but the Israeli–Palestinian conflict persists.”

The word militant does not appear anywhere in that lead now. One opening states genocide as fact and declines to name a single armed group on the other side of the wars it mentions. The conflict does not have combatants any more. It persists.

Palestine: the word militant appeared once, and it was in the sentence about who rules Gaza

then, revision 1178417242, 3 October 2023: “The Gaza Strip has been ruled by the militant Islamic group Hamas and has been subject to a long-term blockade by Egypt and Israel since 2007.” now, revision 1366626752, unchanged in live revision 1369264522: “In 2007, internal divisions between political factions led to a takeover of Gaza by Hamas. Since then, the West Bank has been governed in part by the Fatah-led PA, while the Gaza Strip has remained under the control of Hamas.”

Removed at revision 1184732418 on 12 November 2023, thirty-six days after the October 7 massacre, by the editor Monopoly31121993(2), under the edit summary “also should mention Egyptian rule”. The replacement text read “Hamas seized power after winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative election”. On 6 October 2023 the word militant appeared exactly once in that entire article, and that once was the sentence naming what governs Gaza.

The same opening dropped what Oslo cost the PLO:

then, revision 405145589, 31 December 2010: “In 1993, in the Oslo Accords, Israel acknowledged the PLO negotiating team as “representing the Palestinian people”, in return for the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist in peace, acceptance of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and its rejection of “violence and terrorism”.” now: “In 1993, the PLO signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, creating limited PLO governance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip through the Palestinian Authority (PA).”

Israeli recognition of the PLO was bought in exchange for the PLO renouncing violence and terrorism. In the opening as it now stands, Oslo is a grant of governance with nothing asked in return.

And the space that opened up filled:

then: “Officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it claims the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip as its territory, though the entirety of that territory has been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War.” now: “Following the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, Israel launched a large-scale military campaign in Gaza that has killed over 72,000 Palestinians, caused mass population displacement, a humanitarian crisis, and a famine in the Gaza Strip; these acts have been recognised as constituting genocide against the Palestinian people by a growing scholarly consensus.”

On 3 October 2023 the opening’s entire charged vocabulary was three uses of the word occupation. Today it runs nine: occupation five times, plus genocide, famine, displacement twice and settlers twice. The one word naming what governs Gaza is the word that left.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict: designation zero

then, revision 17938449, 1 July 2005: “Those sympathetic to Israel tend to view the conflict as a campaign of terrorism perpetrated by Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and others, and supported by other states in the region and the majority of the Palestinians.” now, revision 1366125955: “Israel’s occupation resulted in Israel constructing illegal settlements there, creating a system of institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians under its occupation referred to as Israeli apartheid. This discrimination includes Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees from their right of return and right to their lost properties.”

Prose only, excluding the infobox that did not exist in 2005, the pair is four designation words and three accusation words in 2005 against zero designation words and thirteen accusation words now. Publish those as the floor. The designation figure is not a floor. It is zero. The opening of the article named after this conflict does not contain a single word identifying any Palestinian actor as armed, militant or engaged in terrorism.

At the October 2023 hinge, revision 1177797765 of 29 September 2023, the opening’s only accusation vocabulary was two uses of the word occupation. Genocide and famine appeared zero times. The reader now meets genocide, apartheid, famine, colonization and mass displacement before the first section heading:

“Israel’s actions in Gaza during this war have been described by international law experts, genocide scholars and human rights organizations as a genocide.”

The same opening stopped saying what Hamas is:

then, revision 1177797765: “Since 2006, the Palestinian side has been fractured by conflict between Fatah, the traditionally dominant party and its later electoral challenger, Hamas, a militant Islamist group that gained control of the Gaza Strip.” now, revision 1366125955, unchanged in live revision 1368550685: “Since 2006, Israel has fought several wars with the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.”

The word Islamist survives exactly once in the whole article, half way down. The designation was not merely demoted, it was replaced in its own slot by a governance label.

Two more losses from the same opening, both of which survive lower down where almost nobody reads:

then, 2005: “A specific concern is that Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP may emerge from the power vacuum of a post-disengagement Gaza as the political powers in the Gaza Strip.” now: “The peace process also had significant opposition among elements of Palestinian society, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who immediately initiated a campaign of attacks targeting Israelis”

Three armed organisations named as armed in the 2005 opening. None named as armed today; Palestinian Islamic Jihad first appears at 31% depth.

then, revision 669222025, 1 July 2015: “In the early 1930s, the Arab national struggle in Palestine had drawn many Arab nationalist militants from across the Middle East, most notably Sheikh Izaddin al-Qassam from Syria, who established the Black Hand militant group and had prepared the grounds for the 1936 Arab revolt.” now: “The 1936 Arab general strike led to the Peel Commission investigation, and began the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, which demanded an end to British colonial rule and its support for Zionism.”

The opening still dates the revolt. It no longer says an armed group prepared it, and it no longer names Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the man Hamas named its military wing after. That sentence survives at 18% depth, which is a burial rather than an erasure, and we file it as one.

Gaza war: the civilians dropped out of the 7 October sentence

then, revision 1298339796, 1 July 2025: “On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 815 civilians, were killed, and 251 taken hostage with the stated goal of forcing Israel to release Palestinian prisoners.” now, revision 1367287314, same counts in live revision 1369902547: “The war began on 7 October 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas led an attack on Israel, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed and 251 were taken hostage.”

815 of the 1,195 dead were civilians. The opening no longer says so, and no longer says why the 251 were taken. The sentence naming the Nova festival massacre and the kidnapping and killing of the Bibas family is gone from the opening entirely.

The accusation side of the same lead went from nine terms to fifteen, with genocide alone rising from four to nine. The 2025 text hedged: “A growing number of human rights organizations and experts in the fields of genocide studies and international law say that a genocide is occurring in Gaza, though this claim is debated by other legal scholars and organizations.” The current text does not: “Many scholarly sources and international organizations, including UN bodies, NGOs, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide under international law.” The counter-argument is compressed to a single clause about Israel and its supporters denying it.

Two things in that lead cut against us and they go on the page. The designation vocabulary barely moved, eight terms to seven, and the flagged word militant actually rose from three uses to four. The Palestinian casualty line also lost specificity: “over half of them women and children” and the Lancet figure of 64,260 both dropped out. The magnitude of this finding is on the accusation side and in the deleted detail about 7 October, not in a designation drain, and inflating it would cost more than it is worth.

Below the fold, where reach runs out

The word does not always have to be deleted. It only has to be moved somewhere the reader, the search snippet and the language model will not go.

Hamas, the word militant. In the September 2023 article it is in the first sentence, wikilinked. In revision 1369342562 it appears zero times in the opening and eighteen times in the body, the deepest of them 84% of the way down by section index, in the closing United States subsection. An independent recount of body prose gives nineteen, so eighteen is a floor. A reader who stops at the opening never learns it. Neither does anything that quotes the opening.

Hamas, the headings. Between revision 1177107922 of 26 September 2023 and today, the History section lost every subheading it had. Origins, First Intifada and Oslo years no longer exist as headings, so the founding period is unnavigable and unlinkable. Two more were renamed rather than removed: Consultative councils is now Shura Council and Political Bureau, and Children’s magazine is now Al-Fateh magazine, which drops that the audience was children. In the same window the level-two heading Violence and terrorism became Violence, Antisemitism and anti-Zionism became Allegations of antisemitism, and Human shields, Children as combatants, Human rights abuses and Political freedoms stopped being headings at all. The article is 34,184 characters shorter, from 337,560 to 303,376. A topic that stops being a heading does not get argued down. It stops being a topic.

The control group they assembled themselves

WikiProject Palestine keeps a Hall of Fame listing its Featured Articles, the fourteen pages its own editors consider the best work in the topic. Featured status means sustained attention, repeated review and a stable consensus. Run the audit across all fourteen and they split clean in half.

Seven carry findings:

Featured Article	Findings
Abu Nidal	5
Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah	3
Yasser Arafat	2
Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan	1
Balfour Declaration	1
Levantine Arabic	1
Second Crusade	1

Seven carry none:

1940 Mandatory Palestine v Lebanon football match
Fakhr al-Din II, a seventeenth-century Druze emir
Melisende of Jerusalem, a twelfth-century queen
Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, an Umayyad caliph
Tell es-Sakan, a Bronze Age archaeological site
Turabay dynasty, an Ottoman-era Bedouin dynasty
Richard Williams (RAAF officer), an Australian air force commander

Every Featured Article that touches the conflict has moved. Every Featured Article that does not, has not. The instrument was pointed at all fourteen, with the same definitions, on the same day, and it found five findings on the man who ran Black September’s rival faction and nothing at all on a Bronze Age dig site and a 1940 football fixture.

This is the answer to the objection that an audit built by people with a position finds what it went looking for. If the instrument were a keyword scanner tuned to produce hits, the football match would have produced hits. It produced none, and the project chose that football match, not us.

What we refused, and why that is the point

Forty-one machine-found leads on these articles went to a human check. Twenty survived. Twenty were refused and one had moved again since we recorded it, which makes it unpublishable as written. Five whole articles produced nothing at all: the USS Liberty incident, Jerusalem, the Yom Kippur War, Mandatory Palestine and October 7 attacks.

The refusals are not a rounding error. They are the calibration.

The USS Liberty article moved toward the truth, and we grade the underlying claim FALSE ourselves. The lens flagged a redefinition. In fact the current first sentence calls the vessel a spy ship outright, where the 2019 text said only technical research ship, and it names the attacker harder than the 2005 version did. Its short description did not drain; it was created where none existed, and it says “1967 Israeli attack on United States Navy ship”. Both leads died.

October 7 attacks gained a word in the highest-reach slot there is. The short description went from “2023 armed incursions into Israel” to “2023 armed incursions and massacres in Israel” between revision 1303405095 and revision 1314265881, and that is what it still says. Massacres is the exact class of word this project documents Wikipedia removing elsewhere. In reach zone 1.00 the editors made the line more specific about what was done to the victims. Publishing that as bias would be indefensible.

Jerusalem’s history section was cut by 102,875 bytes in a single edit, revision 1244648103 of 8 September 2024, a documented summary-style consolidation that removed the Early Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman headings in the same stroke as the Second Temple and Biblical account ones. The article is also 5,731 bytes longer today than it was on 4 October 2023, which kills the claim that it shrank. Not directional, not a finding.

The Yom Kippur War short description shortened because a gnome tool enforced a length rule. Revision 1032349303 says so in its own summary, naming the Shortdesc helper, and a second edit followed nineteen seconds later. Sixty-six characters down to thirty-nine, no accusation added, Israel still named.

Middle East became West Asia on the Israel article, and that drive runs in every direction at once. The same standardisation moved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict short description away from the Levant and moved Palestine’s opening toward it. A drive that pushes two articles in opposite directions is not a slant.

Refusing is a result. A lead that dies under checking tells us the instrument is noisy in a specific, fixable way, which is worth more than a page nobody can defend. It also means the twenty findings above are not the output of a scanner. They are what was left standing after a human being tried to kill each one and could not.

We publish the losses on our own side too. The Israel article’s 2005 opening said it was a parliamentary democracy and the world’s only Jewish state. Neither Jewish state nor democracy appears anywhere in the live opening. That is a real deletion in the highest-traffic article in this whole corpus, it is not what the lens recorded, and it is now filed as its own lead awaiting confirmation rather than smuggled in under a finding that fits better.

Reach is the finding

The severity of an edit is reach times magnitude, and Wikipedia publishes the reach. It says 17,476,842 people opened these thousand pages in one month. It says which hundred they opened most. Overlay our ledger on their report and 77% of the readership at the top of this topic sits on articles where a word naming what happened has already left the opening, the definition or the one line search engines quote.

That is the whole mechanism. Nothing was falsified. On Palestine, one editor asked to be reverted if he was wrong and nobody reverted him, and now every search result, every knowledge panel and every language model repeats the word he chose. On Israel, an accusation with named accusers became a sentence in the encyclopedia’s own voice in fourteen months, guarded by a note telling editors not to touch it. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the opening carries thirteen words for what Israel stands accused of and zero words identifying anyone on the other side as armed.

And on the football match, the caliph, the queen, the dig site and the Australian airman, chosen for us by the project itself, the instrument found nothing, because there is nothing there to find.

The pages nobody reads are in good order. The correction has to be made where the readers are, which is exactly where the record stopped saying what happened.

Sources

Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine/Popular pages, June 2026 report: 1,000 articles, 17,476,842 views
Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine/Hall of Fame, the fourteen Featured Articles
Israel: revisions 1178754834, 1297914598, 1366794219
Palestine: revisions 405145589, 1178417242, 1184732418, 1214305227, 1214472630, 1366626752, 1369264522
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: revisions 17938449, 669222025, 1177797765, 1366125955, 1368550685
Hamas: revisions 17831504, 1177107922, 1366972139, 1369342562
Zionism: revisions 9034353, 1177123269, 1366662290
Gaza war: revisions 1298339796, 1367287314, 1369902547
Six-Day War: revisions 1178594891, 1366291213, 1368366529
Refused leads cited above: 1244648103 (Jerusalem), 1032349303 (Yom Kippur War), 1303405095 and 1314265881 (October 7 attacks)
The method: zones, reach, and how severity is computed