gkour/israeli_law

Open Israeli Law (Hebrew Wikisource)

Israel's entire body of law — every statute, regulation, and order that Hebrew Wikisource volunteers have transcribed for the "Open Book of Laws" project (ספר החוקים הפתוח) — in one file you can actually load and query.

Nearly 6,000 pages. Almost 100 million characters. One jsonl.

This isn't a scrape of a summary or a curated subset — it's the raw material: full MediaWiki wikitext, straight from the source, with the metadata you need to trace every page back to its exact revision. Bring your own parser, chunker, or fine-tuning pipeline.

Good for:

• RAG — semantic search and retrieval over Israeli legal text
• Fine-tuning — instruction tuning, after you clean and normalize
• Legal NLP research — segmentation, citation linking, summarization, QA

By the numbers

Pages	5,942
Total wikitext	~99,861,644 characters
Median page	~5,329 characters
Mean page	~16,806 characters
Largest single page	1,185,881 characters — the electricity-market service-quality standards (כללי משק החשמל...), a regulation so granular it dwarfs every actual law in the corpus
Rough token estimate	~25M tokens (≈4 chars/token for Hebrew, post-markup)

Where it comes from

Every page was pulled from Hebrew Wikisource (he.wikisource.org), radiating out from the project's home page:

• "ויקיטקסט:ספר החוקים הפתוח" (Open Book of Laws)

Each record carries its pageid, revid, and timestamp, so you can always trace a snippet back to the exact Wikisource revision it came from — no guessing which version of a law you're looking at.

License & legal notes (read this before you redistribute)

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — the safest default for anything built on Wikisource.

Here's the nuance that makes this interesting:

• The laws themselves (statutes, regulations, court decisions) aren't copyrighted under Israeli law — official publications are free for anyone to use.
• But the Wikisource edits on top of them — formatting, transcription choices, structure, templates — are contributor work, and contributors released it under CC BY-SA 4.0.

So the underlying law is free, but the version you're holding has a license attached because of how it got here.

If you redistribute (including cleaned/derived versions), you need to:

1. Attribute Hebrew Wikisource — link back to the project if you can.
2. Keep it ShareAlike — CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible license, no exceptions.
3. Not imply Wikisource endorses your work.

Want to go license-free? If you rebuild the dataset straight from an official government source (Nevo, Reshumot, the Knesset site) and strip out anything Wikisource contributors added, the resulting text could plausibly be public domain / CC0. This dataset deliberately isn't that — it's the Wikisource version, so treat it as CC BY-SA.

Data schema

Each line in israeli_laws.jsonl is one JSON object:

Field	Type	What it is
title	string	Page title (usually the law's name)
pageid	int	MediaWiki page ID
revid	int	Revision ID for this exact snapshot
timestamp	string (ISO 8601)	When that revision was made
wikitext	string	Raw MediaWiki markup — the actual content

Example record

{"title":"חוק איגודי ערים","pageid":382257,"revid":1459999,"timestamp":"2022-12-14T10:21:11Z","wikitext":"..."}

Understanding the wikitext format

The wikitext field is MediaWiki markup — the same markup language Wikipedia is written in, not plain text or HTML. The basics:

Syntax	Meaning
{{template|arg1|arg2}}	A template call — a reusable snippet filled in with arguments
[[Page name]]	A link to another wiki page
'''bold''' / ''italic''	Text formatting
== Heading ==	A section header

On top of that, this project uses its own template dialect prefixed ח: (חוק, "law") that Hebrew Wikisource volunteers built to structure statutes consistently. A real excerpt from חוק הרשויות המקומיות (אגרת העברת מקרקעין):

{{ח:התחלה}}                            law starts here
{{ח:כותרת|חוק ... תשי״ט–1959}}         the law's title
{{ח:סעיף|1|הגדרות}}                    section 1, titled "Definitions"
{{ח:ת}} בחוק זה –                      a paragraph of legal text
{{ח:ת|סוג=הגדרה}} ”רשות מקומית“ – ...  a definition-type paragraph
{{ח:תתת|(1)}} ...                       a nested sub-clause
{{ח:הערה|...}}                          an editorial/explanatory note
{{ח:חיצוני|target#anchor|display text}} a link to another law/section
{{ח:סוגר}}                              closes a block
{{ח:מפריד}}                             a visual divider

So a typical law's body is a sequence of {{ח:סעיף|number|title}} section markers, each followed by {{ח:ת}} calls wrapping the actual paragraphs, with {{ח:תת}} / {{ח:תתת}} for nested sub-clauses.

Not every page follows this pattern — portal/index pages (like the project's own home page, "ספר החוקים הפתוח") have no legal content at all, just large nested [[wikilink]] lists pointing to the real law pages. Filter these out by title if you're building a corpus of actual laws.

Getting from wikitext to something usable

The wikitext field is exactly what a Wikisource editor typed — templates, tables, formatting markup and all. That's a feature (nothing was thrown away) but it means you'll want a pass before feeding it to a model:

1. Strip the markup — render or regex out templates, tables, and category tags. Keep section headers (== כותרת ==) as structural signal; don't just delete them.
2. Normalize — punctuation, whitespace, Hebrew quote marks.
3. Chunk with legal structure in mind — split by siman/se'if (סעיפים), not by arbitrary character count. 300–1,000 tokens per chunk with overlap works well for RAG.
4. Enrich (optional) — attach canonical law IDs, dates, and cross-references to Nevo/Reshumot/Knesset sources; link amendments to the laws they amend.

One catch: "complete dump" means index and portal pages came along for the ride, not just individual laws. If you're building RAG, filter out anything that looks like a project/category page (titles like "ספר החוקים הפתוח" itself) before you embed everything.

What people build with this

• Hebrew-language RAG for legal Q&A
• Statute-level summarization
• Section-level QA datasets, once segmented
• Citation graphs mapping how laws reference each other

Know before you rely on it

• This is not an official source of law. Wikisource is community-maintained — expect typos, occasional missing amendments, and uneven coverage on obscure regulations.
• Templates can hide content. A naive strip-all-braces parser will occasionally eat something you wanted to keep. Test on a sample first.
• Every page is frozen at one revision. The law may have changed since that timestamp — always check it against the current consolidated text if precision matters.

Citing this dataset

If it ends up in a paper or product, a line like this covers you:

"Text sourced from Hebrew Wikisource (he.wikisource.org), 'ספר החוקים הפתוח' project, under CC BY-SA."

How it was built

Pulled straight from the MediaWiki API — page content plus revision metadata, one page per API call, flattened into one JSON object per line.