Berkeley Replaces Finals With LGBTQ+ Wikipedia Edits
UC Berkeley students were told to skip a traditional final. Instead, they edited Wikipedia pages. The work focused on queer and trans people of color. It was part of an ethnic studies course.
Campus Reform reported: “A professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has assigned students an alternative to traditional finals—creating and editing Wikipedia pages about ‘queer and trans people of color.’”
The class used a program run by Wiki Education. The site helps professors fold Wikipedia editing into coursework. The goal, supporters say, is to expand coverage and add reliable citations to underrepresented topics.
“The project is facilitated through Wiki Education, an organization that partners with college faculty to incorporate Wikipedia editing into coursework.”
Students worked on a range of pages. Some were niche. Others sounded odd to critics. Examples reported include pages like “Queer Vampires,” “LGBTQ themes in horror fiction,” and an article about lesbian bars. The instructor framed the work as urgent political resistance.
The professor told The Daily Californian: “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.”
That quote sums up the course’s tone. It’s clearly activist. Supporters call it community-building and research training. They point to big numbers: classes have reportedly made hundreds of thousands of edits, added thousands of citations, and reached millions of views.
Critics push back hard. They call it indoctrination. They say it’s not what students pay tuition for. They argue the work doesn’t prepare people for careers in the same way traditional finals or professional projects might.
This debate is part of a larger fight over higher education and culture. Some see Wikipedia editing as practical, civic-minded work. Others see it as a political shortcut dressed up as scholarship. Either way, the Berkeley experiment is getting attention. Expect more campus arguments like this one.