Tom Gross: what Wikipedia removed
A British journalist and human rights campaigner who has interviewed victims of Islamist terrorism on stage. The 2015 opening said he conducted on-stage interviews “including with a French hostage kidnapped by Islamic State in Syria and a Nigerian schoolgirl kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria.” Today the opening makes no mention of either interview, and the word survives only once in the article. A reader arriving now learns nothing of these interviews and not that Gross specifically interviewed a hostage of the Islamic State.
The word “hostage” appeared 2 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2015. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 1. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.
The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot
Section titled “The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot”| word | 2010 | 2015 | 2020 | 6 October 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hostage | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| terror | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| jihad | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| antisemitism | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.
What was taken out
Section titled “What was taken out”- The photo caption naming an Egyptian dissident he interviewed, reworded rather than removed.
- A quote from a former Pentagon official about Gross, reworded rather than removed.
- The mention of his on-stage interview with a French hostage of the Islamic State, dropped from the opening.
How it opened then, and now
Section titled “How it opened then, and now”2010 (revision 367856340):
Tom Gross is a British-born journalist and international affairs commentator , specializing in the Middle East. He was formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and for the New York Daily News . He is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and National Review in the United States, to The National Post in Canada, to The Australian in Australia, and to The India Times in India. He has also written in Britain for The Daily Telegraph , Spectator , Evening Standard and The Guardian , among other publications, and in Israel for Ha’aretz , Ma’ariv and The Jerusalem Post , and in Iran for a number of opposition websites . Much of his work has concerned the way the internatio…
2025 (revision 1295615434):
British journalist and human rights activist Tom Gross is a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East. Gross was formerly a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News . He now works as an opinion journalist and has written for both Arab and Israeli newspapers, as well as European and American ones, both liberal and conservative. He also appears as a commentator on the BBC in English, BBC Arabic, and various Middle Eastern and other networks. His politics are mixed. The German newspaper Die Welt described Gross as “A liberal in the fight against left-wing liberal hypocrisy”. In a p…
Related
Section titled “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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