The Fight to Preserve Queer History Is Happening One Wikipedia Edit at a Time

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.Lane Rasberry likes to wear the color blue. Only blue. Years ago, a fortune teller said another color would play a role in his death, and Rasberry hasn’t taken chances since.The habit has inspired a cheeky online username, Bluerasberry, that appears in the edit logs of thousands of Wikipedia articles. Faced with LGBTQ+ censorship and erasure around the world, Rasberry is part of a growing community using Wikipedia to preserve and expand access to LGBTQ+ history online.“The only community that's going to stand up and defend LGBT people is the collective global community of other LGBT people,” Rasberry, a professor at the University of Virginia, told The Advocate. “We're in this together, and we have to document our challenges.”Related: How a teacher and her students are bringing queer equality to WikipediaThe Advocate joined this network of activists, historians and hobbyists in Montreal on October 23 for the world’s first fully in-person conference of LGBTQ+ Wikipedia users, dubbed Queering Wiki 2026. More than 150 people representing at least 30 countries attended the conference, according to Wikimedia LGBT+, the user group behind the event. Wikipedia editor Lane Rasberry says he has only worn the color blue for decades. Jack Walker/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikipedia editors generally identify as part of the Open Knowledge Movement, which seeks to make information free and readily accessible online. The site is crowdsourced, allowing volunteers to build and improve articles. But this also leaves its content vulnerable to hostile edits from opponents of LGBTQ+ rights and far-right groups.Wikimedia LGBT+ seeks to both strengthen LGBTQ+ online and protect materials already published. Bisi Alimi, the group’s executive director, says the work is inherently political.“We’ve seen it in the U.S., where we now have a government that is banning books and banning conversations around queerness in schools,?