During the month of Ramadan last May, Wikimedia Israel launched “Nibras Wikipedia,” a competition for students and schools, to celebrate the month of Ramadan and the end of the school year.

The competition was an exciting opportunity to introduce the students to digital collections. It was also a chance for the participants to develop both digital and history literacy skills as they were asked to do this using archival documents.

The competition was conducted in collaboration with the website Jrayed (Jrayed جرايد is newspapers in Arabic), a digital archive of Arabic newspapers in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, a project curated and established by Library of Israel.

Throughout the competition, Wikimedia Israel and Jrayed instructed the students to write new articles and improve existing ones on Arabic Wikipedia on various topics related to Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, including institutions (e.g. Alhambra Cinema (Jaffa)), biographies of educators, government bodies, authors, journalists, musicians (e.g. Wasif Jawhariyyeh), in addition to articles about Arabic periodicals that were published before 1948 (e.g. Al-Difa’ newspaper). The participants also enriched stub articles about towns and cities around the world.

After choosing topics from list about Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, the competition asked students to use Jrayed as a resource for citations. The students achieved remarkable results as 56 articles were written and enriched. The organizing team provided the participants with a guide and a webpage in order to ensure easier navigation through the process.