“מכאן נולד שלום — From here, peace is born.”
This was the comment of one student in a feedback survey for Wikimedia Israel’s groundbreaking initiative Arab and Jewish Students Writing Wikipedia Together. The program, supported by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation, brings Jewish and Arab students into genuine dialogue and collaboration — through the shared creation of free knowledge.
Launched in 2024, the program is implemented as a mandatory academic assignment in Israeli universities. Arab and Jewish students work in joint teams, writing and expanding articles in both Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia. Along the way, they practice critical academic skills such as information literacy, literature review, proper sourcing, and collaborative writing.
Why it matters
The program builds on research by the aChord Institute, which found that collaborative classroom work is a strong predictor of friendships, motivation for social closeness, and more positive intergroup stereotypes — far more than simply sharing the same campus.
At the Hebrew University, where the program was first piloted in 2023–2024, these insights proved true in practice. Students described the assignment as refreshing and innovative compared to their usual coursework, and many shared that the collaboration fostered genuine personal connections across cultural lines. Faculty members also highlighted the sense of pride students felt in publishing articles in both Hebrew and Arabic, knowing that their contributions were now part of a shared public resource.
Encouraged by the pilot’s success, the Rothschild Foundation invited Wikimedia Israel to expand the program in the 2024/2025 academic year.
Beyond the pilot: what students across courses are telling us
To understand the broader impact, we ran an anonymous post-course survey across multiple cohorts in the participating universities (≈95 respondents taught by multiple faculty, spanning four core courses). Highlights:
- Climate uplift in class vs. campus: On a 1–5 scale, students rated the general campus climate between Jewish–Arab groups at 3.74, while the course climate scored 4.38 — an uplift of ~0.6 points, signaling a friendlier, more constructive space in class.
- Connections across lines: 84% reported meaningful or partial personal ties with peers from the other community as a result of the assignment.
- Would do it again: ~65% said they would take a mixed bilingual course again (another ~27% answered “maybe”; only ~5% said “no”).
- Perceived importance: ~79% rated mixed, bilingual courses as important to a great/very great extent (with ~55% choosing the top box).
- Learning experience: ~73% were satisfied or very satisfied with the training provided; ~71% felt satisfied or very satisfied with publishing (or the prospect of publishing) their article; ~79% rated the assignment as innovative (4–5/5).
- Working languages: Teams most frequently wrote in Arabic (43%), in Hebrew (32%), or in both (≈18%), reflecting the project’s bilingual character.
Voices from the classroom
The most powerful testimony to the program’s success comes from those who experienced it: faculty and students.
Faculty voices
Dr. Dan Deutsch (Haifa University):
“The integration of Arabic and Hebrew really moved me. People connected so easily — students who had never sat next to each other or spoken to one another before suddenly sat together and bonded.”
Prof. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology):
“A large part of my interest and agenda in shaping this course is to intervene in the public sphere — not to stay in the ivory tower, but to create access to the things we do.”
Prof. Pavel Goldstein (Haifa University):
“This project allows us to create the framework of project-based learning: students focus on a real problem, they study the content, and they make it accessible. There is a strong sense of contribution here, which is hugely motivating for students. It’s a place where Arabs and Jews truly collaborate.”
Student voices
“First of all, making information accessible is always the best goal.”
“It created a kind of collaboration where I had to talk to the other side, I had to interact with them. It generated a very meaningful cooperation.”
“I feel that we’ve built friendships that go beyond the classroom work.”
“This should be done in every faculty.”
Watch the video
A short film documenting the project, with student and faculty voices, is available here:
🎥 Watch on YouTube (Lior Melul / Wikimedia Israel – CC BY-SA 4.0)
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