A course at the University of California, Berkeley is aiming to address gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage of marginalized communities by having students contribute articles focused on LGBTQ individuals, especially queer and trans people of color. Since 2016, ethnic studies professor Juana María Rodríguez has led this initiative in partnership with Wiki Education, a nonprofit organization that connects universities with Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia is a public-facing project — it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world,” said Rodríguez. “In a political moment where these histories are actively being erased from public view, having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important.”
Rodríguez’s class, Documenting Queer of Color Cultural Production, asks students to research and document contributions made by queer and trans people across culture, history, and society. Instead of traditional papers, students create or edit Wikipedia pages after researching topics often overlooked in mainstream narratives.
“In terms of Wikipedia, there’s just a lot more information about Anglo populations, about white populations. That’s a little more understood as history proper,” Rodríguez explained. “And so I think it becomes particularly important to document these subcultures within these communities. Because it’s not just queer Latinas — it’s queer goth Latinas, it’s queer comics of color, it’s African American slaying, right? It’s very specific topics that might really vary by region, by historical moment, and of course at different places around the world. Those topics, in Wikipedia and in real life, remain really under-studied and really under-researched.”
Since its inception, students in Rodríguez’s classes have added over 59 new articles and more than 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. Some pages have accumulated millions of views.
The importance of this work is highlighted against the backdrop of legislative efforts restricting LGBTQ-related content in education across several states. For instance, Florida passed legislation limiting classroom discussion on LGBTQ topics for younger grades while Texas enacted new laws leading to the removal of many books documenting LGBTQ history from libraries.
Former student Alexia Guerra Cardona wrote about transgender asylum seekers—particularly those migrating from Mexico and Central America—and included resources for organizations supporting LGBTQ migrants seeking refuge or asylum in California. Guerra Cardona shared: “Growing up, I went to a predominantly white charter school, and I was never really ever exposed to history about myself… I think that one thing that ethnic studies has taught me is ‘no history, no self.’ So you need to know where you come from in order to understand where you’re going…”
“That [inclusion of nonprofits] for me… was my favorite contribution out of all my pages,” they said. “Because there’s not a lot of information about where they can go to, where they can receive help… So that’s why I included the nonprofit organizations.”
Guerra Cardona graduated last spring with honors and now works as a paralegal at the Central American Resource Center providing legal services for community college students.
Current student Mia Aguilar is researching trans representation in film internationally for her class project. While existing articles tend to focus on U.S. and European films only, Aguilar aims for broader global coverage: “I very intentionally went into this project wanting to learn from a worldwide perspective… I think that having queer representation or queer people is really important to have as a reminder that queerness is everywhere and it’s so ingrained into history.”
Rodríguez sees lasting value beyond each semester: “That’s why I keep teaching with Wikipedia… The classroom becomes a space of collaborative learning. It demystifies the process of knowledge production… Very frequently I tell students: You’re writing for that 16-year-old in Lagos, Nigeria; you’re writing for the 50-year-old in some rural town in Scotland who maybe saw something on RuPaul’s Drag Race about Indigenous drag queens.”
She hopes her courses encourage lifelong engagement with knowledge creation: “I do want students to understand that research and learning and writing is something that won’t end when they graduate from Berkeley… Those kinds of things really make students feel empowered to not just consume knowledge but to actually think of themselves as people that can produce knowledge for these larger publics… So I’m always really proud of the kind of work that my students do to make Wikipedia a more queer and colorful place for us all to visit.”
The podcast episode highlighting this course appears as part of “Berkeley Voices,” which features stories on UC Berkeley research initiatives impacting lives locally and globally.
