UC-Berkeley Prof Substitutes Exam for Creating Wikipedia Pages About ‘Queer and Trans People of Color’
“frames the project as a form of opposition to the Trump administration”
It’s truly amazing what passes for higher education these days.
Campus Reform reports:
‘QUEER VAMPIRES’: Professor scraps finals for editing LGBTQ+ Wikipedia pages
A 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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Comments
what an …!
You have that the wrong way around. She’s substituted WP editing for an exam, not vice versa. The way you wrote it implies that there’s a requirement to edit WP, which you can get out of by taking an exam instead!
and they will end up being pilots doctors lawyers and someones boss one day
Not John Galt’s.
Early on in my career, I was petrified by the “riskiness” of running my own business. Only when I had nothing to lose (because I was performing the work mainly as a service to my community, and not because I needed the money) did I venture to be my own boss, and it worked out so well I was operating three different businesses for a while, Now I would never by choice be a wage slave again.
🙂
Why would any self-respecting employer hire a graduate from Berkeley? All these mainstream upperclass schools are doing is turning out well-trained (indoctrinated) Socialist, Marxist activists.
Not to worry. The world will deal with Angry Studies graduates, and the dealing won’t be pleasant.