A professor from the University of California is working with students to preserve LGBTQ+ history on Wikipedia. Professor Juana María Rodriguez has partnered with Wiki Education to have students produce historical entries for the site on LGBTQ+ subjects. According to LGBTQ Nation, contributions for these topics have “fallen through the cracks due to contributor bias.”
Since Trump took office last year, the current administration has made concerted efforts to erase LGBTQ+ history across the web. This has included the removal of LGBTQ+ info and history from National Park Service sites. In 2025, the NPS scrubbed the word “trans” from the Stonewall Historic Site’s webpage.
Despite this, Rodriguez is pushing back. “We can really change the narrative of how some of these stories are told,” she told LGBTQ Nation. She reports that her students are creating new pages for Wikipedia, but also editing existing 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 continued. Rodriguez’s course has been taught for a decade, with curriculums covering topics like Transfemicide, Indigenous drag performers, activists and queer bars.
Censorship and erasure of LGBTQ+ history has been a hot button topic in recent years as global and national sentiments against the queer community have shifted negatively. “My goal is always to create Wikipedians,” Rodriguez 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.”
Wikipedia’s editing standards are often strict, with some pages only allowing access for experienced editors. Though Wikipedia has gotten a bad rap for not being a reliable source of information in recent years, Rodriguez says there’s more that goes into the site than meets the eye. “There’s the Wikipedia that we see, and then behind that, every page has a talk page where people talk about issues.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders directed the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services to work with the Attorney General to develop a strategy to eliminate federal funding for K-12 schools that engage in what they called “anti-American ideologies.” This included schools with curriculums including LGBTQ+ history and identities, or what the Trump Administration called “gender ideology,” according to the Human Rights Campaign.
While the government continues to work relentlessly to erase LGBTQ+ identities, allies and advocates are working even harder to preserve the history that fueled the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
