Professor Gets Rid of Finals, Assigns Editing Of “LGBTQ+” Wikipedia Pages Instead
A professor at University of California, Berkeley is giving students an alternative to traditional final exams by having them create and edit Wikipedia entries focused on queer and transgender people of color.
Instead of writing final papers, Ethnic Studies professor Juana Maria Rodriguez assigns students to expand and defend Wikipedia articles related to LGBTQ+ history and transgender topics by adding citations or new material.
The project is run through Wiki Education, which partners with college instructors to incorporate Wikipedia editing into coursework. An investigation by Campus Reform into Rodriguez’s Wiki Education dashboard for her Fall 2025 course, “Queer of Color Critique,” showed the articles assigned to her 16 students. Topics included “Lesbian bar,” “African-American LGBTQ community,” and “LGBTQ people in prison.”
In another class, “Documenting Queer of Color Cultural Production” in Spring 2025, a different group of 16 students edited additional entries such as “Transgender asylum seekers” and “Indigenous drag performers.”
According to The Daily Californian, students in Rodriguez’s courses have made more than 300,000 edits and added about 3,000 citations to Wikipedia, with the pages collectively receiving nearly 100 million views.
Rodriguez has said the topics remain understudied both on Wikipedia and in scholarship. She also described the project publicly as politically relevant, linking it to concerns about policies under the administration of Donald Trump.
“Right now, the Trump administration is trying to erase the very existence of transgender people, so having information about those histories, as well as present challenges facing queer and trans communities, is particularly urgent,” Rodriguez told The Daily Californian. She added that documenting queer and trans histories in a widely used resource like Wikipedia helps ensure those stories remain accessible.
In a separate statement to Campus Reform, however, Rodriguez emphasized that the assignment is intended as an academic exercise rather than activism. “The educational goal of the assignment is primarily to help students provide evidence-based accounts of notable people and events,” she wrote. “In the process, they develop advanced research skills while learning to present information in a clear, neutral tone.”
Rodriguez teaches in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies, with research interests including transgender studies, queer activism in the Americas, and sex work. She has praised her students’ contributions to Wikipedia, saying she is proud of their efforts to expand representation in the online encyclopedia.
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