This professor and her students are making sure Wikipedia doesn’t erase LGBTQ+ history

Amid the misinformation surge and attempts by the Trump administration to censor LGBTQ+ history, a university professor and her students are creating and editing Wikipedia pages to ensure they accurately preserve and authentically represent the lives and stories of LGBTQ+ people, especially queer and trans people of colour.  

Since 2016, Juana María Rodríguez – a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley – has utilised Wikipedia editing in several of her modules and overseen students in adding vital information to a wide-range of topics on the online encyclopedia, including Mexican LGBTQ+ history, Bad Bunny, sex worker movements, trans people in sport and ballroom culture.

During those 10 years, her students have created 63 new articles and edited 588 others, adding 332,000 words and more than 3,000 citations across pages that have collectively been viewed more than 900 million times.

“As a professor, I am really proud of the impact my students are having to make sure that Wikipedia reflects the diversity of the world,” Rodríguez told PinkNews.

When asked about her favourite articles that her students have created and edited, Rodríguez said a page was created for Bay Area trans advocate Adela Vazquez who passed away in October 2024.

“Adela was a dear friend of mine who died,” she said, “and it feels important that future generations will be able to learn about her amazing life and her many contributions through Wikipedia.”

A decade on from when she started, under the current Trump administration Rodríguez says her and her students’ work “feels more urgent than ever”.

Immediately after returning to the White House for his second term in January 2025, Trump signed several executive orders, each of which seemed to have the explicit goal of removing trans people from public life.

These orders have included proclaiming the official policy of the US is that there are “only two sexes”, banning transgender people from serving in the military, restricting gender-affirming healthcare for trans youngsters under the age 19 and barring trans women and girls from female sports.

Trump has also moved to cull diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes across the government and in the military. This move, coupled by campaigning by anti-woke MAGA activist Robby Starbuck, has seen several big name US businesses – including Walmart, Target, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s – drop their DEI policies, programmes and targets.

Many of the cuts to DEI content were carried out by the newly-created and highly controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed up at the start by Trump’s ‘first buddy’-turned-frenemy Elon Musk, which Trump said would weed out “massive waste and fraud” in government spending.

Cuts included closed down USAID, the world’s largest provider of food aid, firing staff from various government departments en masse and revoking funding for HIV research, amongst many other things. Regardless, months on, it is a mystery what DOGE actually did, other than cause chaos.

Amid Trump’s administration’s pledge to eliminate DEI content, the website for Stonewall National Monument – which is run by the National Park Service – removed references to trans people from the website in February, prompting widespread outrage from members of LGBTQ+ community around the world.

The monument commemorates the historic 1969 riots outside the Stonewall Inn, which was a turning point for gay and lesbian liberation in the twentieth century and involved trans women like Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Subsequently, as well as trans people, references to bisexual people were also seemingly removed from the website.

“The Trump administration is trying to erase the contributions of marginalised populations, to deny the contributions of people of colour, of immigrants, and to whitewash US history,” Rodríguez said.

“Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, remains one way that we can continue to document the truth of our histories and our social movements.

“Wikipedia is driven by research, all of the pages must be supported by independent verifiable research and reputable news accounts, those are the sources that my students help provide.”

The administration’s crack down on DEI content has also seen a huge surge in attempts to ban books and remove any and all references to LGBTQ+ people from school and college curriculums, which is labelled “indoctrination”.

In recent months, higher education institutes across the US have closed their LGBTQ+ and women’s centres, halted courses that focus on gender and race issues and even fired a trans teaching assistant after a student – who quoted the Bible as a source – was given a failing grade.

As a scholar working at the intersection of conversations about ethnicity, gender and sexuality, Rodríguez said her students at Berkeley are “well aware of the informational privilege they have”.

“Not only do they have access to a world class library, they are still free to take classes in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies,” she said, “classes that are being eliminated, if not outlawed, in other places.”

Throughout the changing politics that contextualises the importance of their projects, the work Rodríguez and her students carry out is made possible through a partnership with Wiki Education, which supports and trains academics and students in how they can share their specialist knowledge with the general public through Wikipedia.

Given Wikipedia is wholly edited by volunteer contributors, known as Wikipedians, there has been much discussion in both academia and the media about how ideological and systematic biases impact the reliability and diversity of the online encyclopedia – there is even a Wikipedia page on the topic itself.

In particular, there are widely noted gender, geographic and linguistic disparities, with around 80-90 per cent of Wikipedia editors being men who live in Europe and North America, who edit the English language pages.

Research has previously found biographical articles about women only make up around one-fifth of all the biographical articles on the platform, while other studies have found many of the biographies that will be marked for deletion are women – despite only making up a minority of biographies in the first place.

It is a bias Wiki Education sought to address when it partnered with National Women’s Studies Association some years go, a pairing which has proved fruitful, with nearly 11 million words and more than 100,000 citations added.

“One of the most interesting things I’ve learned,” Rodríguez said, “is that there is a whole global community of Wikipedians dedicated to ensuring that high quality LGBTQIA* content gets published on the site.

“There are many community guidelines and best practices on how to address topics such as dead-naming, or how to reference the sexuality of historical figures or of non-western individuals and groups.

“As a professor, those guidelines have served to raise really important issues in my classes, they also affirm all the ways in which Wikipedians are invested in bringing high quality, independent research to bear on these issues.”

There have been also long been recurring claims that Wikipedia promotes primarily left-wing perspectives.

This led tech billionaire and anti-woke zealot Musk and his artificial intelligence firm xAI to launch an AI-generated online encyclopedia called ‘Grokipedia’ – an alternative to Wikipedia that creates, sources and edits articles using AI.

As PinkNews has previously shown, ironically Musk’s own right-wing bias is glaring on Grokipedia with the site’s article on ‘transgender’ – something which Musk has previously called the ‘woke mind virus’ – perpetuating transphobic dogwhistles less than 13 words in.

“We already have evidence of the way Grok, and other forms of AI hallucinate or ‘make up’ information, including citing information that does not exist. That problem is only getting worse,” Rodríguez explained.

“In contrast, the Wikipedia community actively seeks out AI generated content, real people verify if the sources cited actually exist.

“An encyclopedia is only as reliable as its sources, and Wikipedia actively ensures that the sources cited in its pages are independent and reliable.

“If Musk and others believe that Wikipedia has a ‘liberal bias’ it is only because the truth, the research, the evidence is on our side.

“Thankfully today we have decades of queer and trans studies scholarship to draw on, scholarship that has been vetted and peer-reviewed, that has been published in top tier academic journals and presses, research that accurately reflects trans and queer history, cultures, and contributions.”