Berkeley students fight erasure by editing Wikipedia

At a time of rising attempts to erase LGBTQ+ histories, students at UC Berkeley are using Wikipedia as a tool of resistance, ensuring that the stories of queer and trans people of colour remain visible and accessible to the world.

Today’s battles over queer and trans visibility aren’t only taking place in legislatures and courtrooms, they’re also unfolding on the pages of the world’s largest online encyclopedia. A unique classroom project at the University of California, Berkeley is turning Wikipedia into a tool of resistance, ensuring that histories of LGBTQ+ people, especially those of colour,  are preserved for the public record.

Since 2016, Juana María Rodríguez, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, has integrated Wikipedia editing into her courses as a core assignment. Rather than traditional essays that end up in a drawer, Rodríguez’s students are tasked with researching, writing, and updating Wikipedia articles on LGBTQ+ topics that have historically been under-documented or omitted.

Over the past decade, these students have created dozens of new articles and edited hundreds more, contributing hundreds of thousands of words and thousands of reputable citations focused on queer and trans people of colour. Their work has included documenting Mexican LGBTQ+ history, ballroom culture, sex worker movements, and local queer life in San Francisco’s Chinatown, stories that are seldom found in dominant historical narratives.

Rodríguez calls Wikipedia “a public-facing project, it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world,” adding that “in a political moment where these histories are actively being erased, having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important.”

Her project is also backed through an academic partnership with Wiki Education, a nonprofit that helps train educators and students to contribute high-quality research to Wikipedia while upholding rigorous sourcing standards.

This kind of academic involvement with Wikipedia has a long history at Berkeley. As early as 2010, students and professors at the university were already participating in programs designed to enhance Wikipedia’s credibility and usefulness as a scholarly resource. A pilot initiative then brought Wikipedia into classroom use across multiple public universities, with instructors assigning students to improve entries on public policy topics as part of their coursework.

While that earlier engagement focused broadly on improving encyclopaedic accuracy, today’s efforts under Rodríguez have a more specific political urgency, stemming from what she describes as contemporary attempts to erase queer and trans histories from public awareness. Her students’ contributions help bridge gaps left by systemic biases in historical documentation and knowledge production.

The Wikipedia work not only preserves queer histories in the face of erasure but teaches students media literacy, research methodology, and the importance of public knowledge. For many contributors, the project serves as a powerful lesson in how communities can shape the digital record, create visibility for marginalized identities, and push back against narratives that overlook or exclude them.

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