Since 2016, UC Berkeley professor Juana Mar\u00eda Rodr\u00edguez has been assigning her students the task of creating and updating over 300,000 Wikipedia entries, with the goal of preserving queer and trans history and celebrating the intersectionality of the BIPOC LGBTQ+ community.<\/p>\n
As the Daily Californian reports<\/a>, Juana Mar\u00eda Rodr\u00edguez, an ethnic studies, gender and women\u2019s studies, and performance studies professor at the University of California Berkeley, began the project in 2016 with the support of the local nonprofit Wiki Education<\/a>, which aims to fill knowledge gaps on the site around gender, racial, and ethnic diversity. Per the Daily Cal, Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s students have made over 300,000 updates and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia to date \u2014 totaling more than 96 million views, while spotlighting in particular the lives of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.<\/p>\n \u201cI want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge but as being able to produce knowledge as well,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez told the Daily Cal.<\/p>\n Per the Daily Cal, some of the people Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s students have highlighted include Indigenous drag queens<\/a>, transgender activists Adela V\u00e1zquez<\/a> and Karla Avelar<\/a> and Oakland gay landmark, the White Horse Bar<\/a>. <\/p>\n As the site Them reports<\/a>, students have also documented LGBTQ history in Chinatown<\/a> and international sex worker movements<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt becomes particularly important to document these subcultures within these communities,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez told Them. \u201cBecause it\u2019s not just queer Latinas \u2014 it\u2019s queer goth Latinas, it\u2019s queer comics of color, it\u2019s African American slaying, right?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very specific topics that might really vary by region, by historical moment, and of course at different places around the world,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez continued, per Them. Those topics, in Wikipedia and in real life, remain really under-studied and really under-researched.\u201d<\/p>\n Per Them, preserving BIPOC and LGBTQ+ history is now more important than ever as the federal government moves to erase queer and transgender people from its historical programs and websites, including the stripping of Harvey Milk’s name from a US Navy ship last June, as reported by SFist<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cRight 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,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez continued, per the Daily Cal. \u201cQueer and trans people have always been here, and adding that information to the world\u2019s largest open access encyclopedia is one way to make sure that these stories remain available.\u201d<\/p>\n Image: Landa Lakes, SF-based Indigenous drag queen\/Facebook<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since 2016, UC Berkeley professor Juana Mar\u00eda Rodr\u00edguez has been assigning her students the task of creating and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-161038","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}