In a world overrun by fake news, Professor Juana María Rodríguez is unflinchingly committed to facts. 

Since 2016, the University of California, Berkeley professor has mobilized students to preserve LGBTQ+ stories on one of the world’s most extensive historical records: Wikipedia. 

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Through a unique course taught in partnership with Wiki Education, Rodríguez and her students produce entries for the site that cover niche LGBTQ+ subjects, many of which have fallen through the cracks due to contributor bias. And as the Trump administration works overtime to erase LGBTQ+ history from the national consciousness, Rodríguez knows that the best defense is putting cold, hard facts in front of as many readers as possible.

“We can really change the narrative of how some of these stories are told,” Rodríguez told LGBTQ Nation, explaining that her students are involved in both editing existing pages and creating new ones.

“The Trump administration can erase the T from Stonewall, but we can point them to 20 academic sources that talk about the centrality of trans people to Stonewall and to other uprisings,” she explained. 

In essence, she added, “We bring the receipts.”

Creating lifelong Wikipedians

Rodríguez has taught the course in nine different iterations over the past decade. Her students have tackled everything from Transfemicide (a page that has now been translated into four languages) to Indigenous Drag Performers to lesser-known activists like Adela Vázquez to the stories of historic, now-shuttered queer bars like Esta Noche and Jewel’s Catch One.

One student, Alexia Guerra Cardona, spoke on a Berkeley podcast about the course’s incredible impact on her. A child of Guatemalan immigrants who fled civil war, Cardona said she is most proud of the content she produced on trans asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America because it helped her feel closer to her own ancestral history. She attended a predominantly white school growing up, where Central American history was never centered.

“You need to know where you come from in order to understand where you’re going or what you want to do,” she said. 

Rodríguez has loved watching her students – who often start the course feeling extremely anxious about the responsibility before them – gradually feel empowered to be disseminators of knowledge rather than passive consumers of it.

It is no small accomplishment, she said, to ensure accurate, inclusive information is available to anyone who needs it.

“My goal is always to create Wikipedians,” she said. “To know that they can read something and maybe what they read doesn’t quite reflect what they learned from this class, and they can go in and change that… to make them better or more inclusive or more representative… It feels great for everybody.”

We did that 

Rodríguez emphasized that Wikipedia editing isn’t the wild west. There are strict standards, and some of the larger pages are locked down to experienced editors only. Beyond that, editors constantly communicate with one another to ensure that pages provide accurate information.

“There’s the Wikipedia that we see, and then behind that, every page has a talk page where people talk about issues.”

She said her students have experienced pushback at times, such as when one wanted to add information about same-sex desire in Imperial China to the page on the Han Dynasty.

“The Wikipedia page on the Han dynasty, you can imagine, is very well sourced, it’s very reputable. It had absolutely nothing about same-sex anything… So they brought the receipts, they added a very small section, but now that section exists there.”

But at first, the student received a note warning them of the page’s high quality. But Rodríguez said it only motivated them to ensure accuracy even more. “It was like, OK, we received the warning. We’re going to make sure that we’re bringing high-quality receipts.”

“And we did that.”

Now, anyone who reads about the Han Dynasty will know that, as the page explains, “bisexuality was the norm” among nobility, among whom there was “openness to bisexuality or homosexuality.” 

It may seem small, but it is moments like these that affirm that LGBTQ+ people have always been here.

Fighting fire with fact

Many college students today have no doubt come from the increasing number of K-12 schools (largely in red states) that have taken active steps to suppress curriculum that teaches LGBTQ+ issues or even acknowledges that LGBTQ+ people exist at all.

Over the past several years, GOP-led governments at the state level have authorized a slew of book bans and curriculum restrictions under the guise of “parental rights” in education.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 19 states have at least one LGBTQ specific school censorship law, while only 8 have a law mandating LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula. The organization estimates that 39% of LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 13 and 17 live in states with censorship laws, compared to 26% that live in states with inclusive laws and 35% that live in states with no LGBTQ+-specific curricular statutes.

The second Trump administration has also taken extraordinary steps to prevent Americans from learning anything about LGBTQ+ history or identities. 

In 2025, alone, among many other anti-LGBTQ+ actions, the administration removed all references to transgender people from the National Park Service webpage on the Stonewall National Monument; renamed the USNS Harvey Milk (named for the assassinated gay activist) after a straight person;  repeatedly attempted to cut federal funding to schools with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; instructed schools operated by the Department of Defense to purge curriculum related to immigration, gender, and sexuality; and declared the federal government would no longer recognize the existence of trans people at all. 

In response to Donald Trump’s executive orders, even some universities have cracked down on LGBTQ+ curricula. In September, for example, a lecturer at Texas A&M University was fired for acknowledging trans people exist. The school also recently announced it has ended its Women’s & Gender Studies program for being too “woke.”

And a Catholic college in Illinois, Benedictine University, removed pages from its website claiming to offer safe spaces for diverse communities after anti-trans groups called out the school for hosting an event to honor the Trans Day of Remembrance. 

Rodríguez believes that the fact that her students create extensively researched entries that must be written in a neutral tone is especially powerful under the current climate. “It’s persuasive because the facts are on our side,” she said.

Rodríguez credits Wiki Education as an indispensable partner in the project. “They do all the trainings, they train professors, and they train students.” She has also since joined one of their boards and has served as a mentor for other professors who want to do this work.

She hopes more classrooms take up projects like hers and that more students feel empowered to engage in this kind of active learning and knowledge-sharing, which allows their work to go far beyond the classroom.

“It’s not like they’re giving me a paper that only I’m reading,” she said. “They really are writing for the world.”

Who they write for

Rodriguez acknowledges that Wikipedia is not the “be-all end-all” source of information, but that it offers a great jumping-off point for people who need to build a foundation of knowledge on a topic.

That said, millions of people worldwide rely on Wikipedia for information. Rodríguez said her students’ pages have racked up millions of views, which isn’t surprising, considering the encyclopedia behemoth’s monthly pageviews number in the billions. It is consistently ranked among the top 10 most visited websites in the world.

Many readers of the site no doubt lack access to world-class academic resources like those available in the Berkeley library for students to draw from. It is critical work, Rodríguez said, to reproduce this information in an easy-to-find, digestible manner that isn’t hidden behind a paywall.

“One of the things that I tell my students is that they’re writing for the teenager in Arkansas, and in Lagos, Nigeria,” Rodríguez said. “They’re writing for the person in Scotland who maybe just met a trans person for the first time, and they want to know more about it. They’re writing for activists. They’re writing for each other.”