It’s truly amazing what passes for higher education these days.
Campus Reform reports:
‘QUEER VAMPIRES’: Professor scraps finals for editing LGBTQ+ Wikipedia pagesA professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) assigns students an alternative to traditional finals—creating and editing Wikipedia pages about “queer and trans people of color.”Instead of writing final papers, Ethnic Studies Professor Juana Maria Rodriguez has students complete an assignment in which they expand and defend Wikipedia articles related to LGBTQ+ history and transgenderism by adding citations or new material.The project is facilitated through Wiki Education, an organization that partners with college faculty to incorporate Wikipedia editing into coursework.Campus Reform investigated Rodriguez’s Wiki Education dashboard for her “Queer of Color Critique” Fall 2025 course, which revealed the Wikipedia articles assigned to her roster of 16 students for the semester.Students were tasked with editing and reviewing webpages such as “Queer vampires,” “LGBTQ themes in horror fiction,” “Disability and LGBTQ people,” and “Gay characters in telenovelas.”Other articles included “Lesbian bar,” “African-American LGBTQ community,” and “LGBTQ people in prison.”In Rodriguez’s “Documenting Queer of Color Cultural Production” Spring 2025 course, another group of 16 students edited additional entries, including “Transgender asylum seekers” and “Indigenous drag performers.”According to The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student-run newspaper, students in Rodriguez’s classes have made more than 300,000 edits and added 3,000 citations to Wikipedia articles, collectively amassing nearly 100 million views.“Those topics, in Wikipedia and in real life, remain really under-studied and really under-researched,” Rodriguez said on UC Berkeley’s podcast discussing the project.Rodriguez frames the project as a form of opposition to the Trump administration and has assigned it to her classes since President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
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