Wikipedia as resistance: This UC Berkeley class makes queer contributions visible

Anne Brice (narration): This is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast. I’m Anne Brice. 

(Music: “Jadie Grange” by Blue Dot Sessions)

After Wikipedia made its debut in 2001, some trends quickly emerged. Most editors were male, topics tended to skew toward geek culture interests like computing and gaming, and only a small fraction of biographies were about women. 

Although the open-source online encyclopedia does have a set of policies that people who add or edit content are asked to follow — namely that it has a neutral point of view, is verifiable and doesn’t include your own original research — biases and knowledge gaps of all sorts remain, especially for marginalized communities. 

But a UC Berkeley professor and her students are working to change that. 

Juana María Rodríguez: My name is Juana María Rodríguez, and I’m a professor in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, where I also hold an appointment in performance studies. 

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Anne Brice (narration): Since 2016, Juana has partnered with Wiki Education, a nonprofit that connects universities and Wikipedia, to teach a range of courses in which students create and edit Wikipedia articles. 

In them, they research and document the contributions of LGBTQ people, especially queer and trans people of color. Instead of turning in a final paper, students conduct extensive research — often in the campus’s ethnic studies library — and then, create, edit or expand Wikipedia pages, after workshopping their edits with the class. This semester, she’s teaching the course Documenting Queer of Color Cultural Production. 

Juana María Rodríguez: This particular class invites students to think of all the different ways that queer and trans and gender non-conforming people contribute to culture, history and society. 

Wikipedia is a public-facing project, it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world. And so in it, students work on these Wikipedia projects to document these contributions. I think right now, in a political moment where these histories are actively being erased from the public view, I think having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important. 

Anne Brice (narration): In Florida, for example, the 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act severely restricts classroom instruction on LGBTQ topics, including many discussions of historical figures and events, especially in early grades.

In Texas, new laws regulating library acquisition and content review has led to the removal of hundreds of books, many of which detail LGBTQ history, experience and identity. 

And in recent years, more than 100 anti‑trans bills have been signed into law across U.S. states, restricting gender‑affirming medical care, the use of gender pronouns, sports participation and bathroom access.

(Music: “Coulis Coulis” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Students in the Berkeley class have researched a huge range of topics, from Indigenous drag performers and sex worker movements to LGBTQ history in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Since Juana began teaching the class, her students have added more than 59 new articles and over 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. She says some of the pages they’ve created have had millions of views and counting.  

Juana María Rodríguez: 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. 

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. 

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Anne Brice (narration): Alexia Guerra Cardona took Juana’s class last spring. They wrote about several topics, including transgender asylum seekers — people who leave their home countries because of stigmatization or persecution for refuge in another country. She focused on the experiences of those migrating from Mexico and Central America. 

Migration of vulnerable peoples is a topic close to Alexia’s heart. Born in Los Angeles to parents who left Guatemala following a decadeslong civil war, she grew up hearing stories of their migration and how they made their way once they got to the U.S.

But she didn’t really see her own experiences reflected back to her until she got to Berkeley.

Alexia Guerra Cardona: Growing up, I went to a predominantly white charter school, and I was never really ever exposed to history about myself, in terms of being Central American.

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, what you want to do. 

We oftentimes don’t understand where our parents are coming from because we don’t understand the broader histories. And for that reason, I feel like it’s just so healing to learn about yourself because then you learn from what you’re coming from and it’s not like a question mark anymore. You can really see yourself reflected in others.

Anne Brice (narration): In writing the Wikipedia page about trans asylum seekers, Alexia made sure to include organizations that support LGBTQ people intending to migrate to California or who need asylum in the state. 

Alexia Guerra Cardona: That, for me, I feel like was my favorite contribution out of all of my pages. Because there’s not a lot of information about where they can go to, where they can receive help. Even then, there’s cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries. For my community specifically, I feel like it’s really hard to ask for help. So that’s why I included the nonprofit organizations. 

(Music: “Pack to the Market” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): Alexia graduated last spring with honors and a double major in ethnic studies and political science. Juana was the one to call out their name as they walked across the stage. 

Now Alexia is working as a paralegal with the Central American Resource Center, where they provide legal services for community college students. And they’re planning to apply to law school to become a human rights lawyer.  

They chalk up their ability to write in a neutral yet authoritative tone that’s necessary in legal writing to the skills they learned in the class. 

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Fourth-year ethnic studies major Mia Aguilar is in Juana’s Documenting Queer of Color Cultural Production class this semester. She’s researching trans representation in film in several countries in the world, including Iran, China and Mexico. There’s already a Wiki page on the topic, but as it is now, it’s mostly focused on U.S. and European films. 

Mia has been immersing herself in historical documents and foreign films, including documentaries about the Muxe people, a third gender within the Indigenous Zapotec culture of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Mia Aguilar: I very intentionally went into this project wanting to learn from a worldwide perspective. I mean, Wikipedia is used by so many people, so 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.

(Music: “Homin Brer” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): Juana says that Wikipedia, with its billions of global visitors every month, is a valuable open-access tool for students. 

Anne Brice: It just really strikes me that in learning about queer people of color in the U.S. and across the world in all these different countries and then sharing that, researching it and sharing it, they’re becoming historians. They’re telling a more full picture of history and of the people who have been here this whole time and of the nuances of all these different communities. And so I’m curious, yeah, what you think about that. It just seems like such a big impact that it’s having.

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Juana María Rodríguez: That’s why I keep teaching with Wikipedia. I mean, it impacts them. I think it changes the classroom. The classroom becomes a space of collaborative learning. It demystifies the process of knowledge production. 

And it has a really far-reaching impact across the world. 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. In learning things we don’t know, it inspires us to keep learning. 

(Music: “A Rush of Clear Water” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): Juana says she hopes her classes like this one create lifelong Wikipedians.

Juana María Rodríguez: I do want students to understand that research and learning and writing is something that won’t end when they graduate from Berkeley. Sometimes you can read something and you’re like, “Well, that doesn’t sound quite right. I read this book or this article that said something quite different,” and now you know how to change it, right? 

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. 

Anne Brice (narration): I’m Anne Brice, and this is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. This episode was produced by me and Lila Thulin. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. 

You can find Berkeley Voices wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube @BerkeleyNews. 

This is the second episode of our new season of Berkeley Voices. In six episodes, we hear from UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it. New episodes come out on the first Thursday of every month, from November through April. Next month, though, that falls on New Year’s Day, so we’ll release that episode a week later on Jan. 8.

We also have another show, Berkeley Talks, that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. 

You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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