Since 2016, UC Berkeley professor Juana María Rodríguez has been assigning her students the task of creating and updating over 300,000 Wikipedia entries, with the goal of preserving queer and trans history and celebrating the intersectionality of the BIPOC LGBTQ+ community.
As the Daily Californian reports, Juana María Rodríguez, an ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and performance studies professor at the University of California Berkeley, began the project in 2016 with the support of the local nonprofit Wiki Education, which aims to fill knowledge gaps on the site around gender, racial, and ethnic diversity. Per the Daily Cal, Rodríguez’s students have made over 300,000 updates and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia to date — totaling more than 96 million views, while spotlighting in particular the lives of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” Rodríguez told the Daily Cal.
Per the Daily Cal, some of the people Rodríguez’s students have highlighted include Indigenous drag queens, transgender activists Adela Vázquez and Karla Avelar and Oakland gay landmark, the White Horse Bar.
As the site Them reports, students have also documented LGBTQ history in Chinatown and international sex worker movements.
“It becomes particularly important to document these subcultures within these communities,” Rodríguez told Them. “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,” Rodríguez continued, per Them. Those topics, in Wikipedia and in real life, remain really under-studied and really under-researched.”
Per Them, preserving BIPOC and LGBTQ+ history is now more important than ever as the federal government moves to erase queer and transgender people from its historical programs and websites, including the stripping of Harvey Milk's name from a US Navy ship last June, as reported by SFist.
“Right now, the Trump administration is trying to erase the very existence of transgender people, so having information about those histories, as well as present challenges facing queer and trans communities, is particularly urgent,” Rodríguez continued, per the Daily Cal. “Queer and trans people have always been here, and adding that information to the world’s largest open access encyclopedia is one way to make sure that these stories remain available.”
Image: Landa Lakes, SF-based Indigenous drag queen/Facebook
