Iran hostage crisis: what Wikipedia removed

The Iran hostage crisis began in 1979 when the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized and 52 Americans held for 444 days. In 2010 the opening said the embassy was taken over by “a group of Islamist students and militants… in support of the Iranian Revolution.” Today’s opening is built around an infobox of belligerents and commanders and does not carry this description; militant survives 3 times elsewhere in the article. A reader today does not learn, from the opening, that the people who seized the embassy were described as Islamist students and militants.

The word “militant” appeared 2 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2010. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 3. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

Where this comes from

We saved this article’s opening paragraph at 6 moments between 2005 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/iran-hostage-crisis.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

word	2005	2010	2015	2020	6 October 2023	2025
militant	0	2	0	0	0	0
terror	0	0	3	3	4	3
islamist	0	1	0	0	0	0
jihad	0	0	0	0	0	1
occupation	0	0	0	0	0	2
hostage	2	9	13	14	16	21

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

What was taken out

• The sentence identifying the embassy’s captors as Islamist students and militants, dropped from the opening.
• A sentence describing the failed negotiations and the crisis’s climax, dropped from the opening.
• The sentence naming the Algiers Accords that ended the crisis, dropped from the opening.
• The sentence describing the hostages’ formal release into U.S. custody, dropped from the opening.
• A characterization of the crisis, reworded rather than removed.
• A sentence citing the U.S. executive order and describing the hostage-taking as widely seen as a violation, dropped from the opening.

How it opened then, and now

2005 (revision 17941330):

The Iran hostage crisis was a 444-day period during which the new government of Iran after the Iranian Revolution held hostage 66 diplomats and citizens of the United States . It is believed by many to have caused President Jimmy Carter of the United States to lose his re-election attempt, and punctuated the first fundamentalist Islamic revolution of modern times. It began on November 4 , 1979 and lasted until January 20 , 1981 .

2025 (revision 1297468607):

Occupation of Tehran’s U.S. embassy (1979–1981) This article is about the siege of the American embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries. For the siege of the Iranian embassy in London by Arab separatists, see Iranian Embassy siege . Belligerents Iran First Interim Government (1979) Second Interim Government (1979–1980) Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line People’s Mojahedin Organization Algeria (mediator) United States Canada Commanders and leaders Ruhollah Khomeini Mehdi Bazargan (resigned) Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha Massoud Rajavi Mohammed Seddik Benyahia Jimmy Carter Cyrus Vance (until April 28, 1980) Edmund Muskie (from May 8, 1980) Warren Christopher James B. Vaught Joe Clar…

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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