Christianity in the Middle East: what Wikipedia removed

The article covers Christianity’s steep decline across the Middle East, a population that fell from a claimed 20 percent of the region to 5 percent today. The 2015 opening attributed part of that decline to “the recent spread of Jihadist and Salafist ideology” and stated that in 2014 “the Assyrian population of North Iraq collapsed due to the Jihadist persecution.” Today’s opening gives the population figures, now down from 13 percent to 5 percent, with no cause named; the word jihad is gone from the article entirely. A reader today learns that the Christian population collapsed but not that Jihadist persecution, including the 2014 collapse of Iraq’s Assyrian community, was named as a cause.

The word “indigenous” appeared 2 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2015. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 6. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

Where this comes from

We saved this article’s opening paragraph at 5 moments between 2010 and 2025. Everything below is Wikipedia’s own text, quoted from those saved copies. The interactive version, with every snapshot side by side and each removal marked in place, is at ilroot.com/case/christianity-in-the-middle-east.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

word	2010	2015	2020	6 October 2023	2025
indigenous	0	0	0	0	0
islamist	0	0	1	1	1
jihad	0	2	0	0	0
antisemitism	0	0	0	1	1
genocide	0	2	4	6	15
disputed	0	1	1	1	1

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

What was taken out

• A near-identical rewording, the opening still states Christianity originated in the Middle East in the 1st century.
• A rewording of the sentence describing Christianity’s diversity in the region, now compared explicitly to Christianity elsewhere.
• The historical baseline changed from a claimed 20 percent to 13 percent; neither version carries the word jihad.
• The sentence naming Jihadist and Salafist ideology as a factor unsettling Christian communities was dropped from the opening.
• A sentence on denominational breakdown was replaced by the infobox pie chart of Christian traditions in the region.
• The note on Maronites often avoiding an Arabic ethnic identity was dropped from the opening.

How it opened then, and now

2010 (revision 362963970):

Christians are dispersed throughout many different Middle Eastern countries, but are mainly found in the Fertile Crescent and the Caucasus . Christianity has its origin in the Middle East and was the major religion of the region from the time of Jesus and for some time after the Muslim Conquests of the seventh century. Although Greek was the dominant language of the Early Church emerging from Hellenized communities around the Eastern Mediterranean ( Anatolia , the Levant and Egypt ), many Christian groups used other, local languages, of which Syriac , Armenian , Coptic , Ge’ez , Georgian and Arabic are prominent.

2025 (revision 1297719786):

Ethnic group Related topics Art Adherents Criticism Culture Ecumenism Liturgy Mission Other religions Persecution Prayer Sermon Symbolism Western society Worship Sabbath in Christianity Gregorian calendar Glossary Index Outline Christianity portal v t e Relative size of Christian traditions in the Middle East & North Africa. Catholic (43.5%) Eastern / Oriental Orthodox (43.0%) Protestant (13.5%) Other Christian (0.10%) Christianity , which originated in the Middle East during the 1st century AD , is a significant minority religion within the region, characterized by the diversity of its beliefs and traditions, compared to Christianity in other parts of the Old World . Today, Christians make …

Related

• The drift report: what changed across all 61,944 watched articles
• The case file for this article, with every snapshot and every marked removal
• Who made the cuts: removals grouped by the account that made them
• The live article on Wikipedia

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