Berkeley’s latest pedagogical innovation teaches undergraduates the fine art of flood-the-zone narrative management and associated memory-holing as a means to “preserve” history.
Professor of Ethnic Studies Juana María Rodríguez has cracked the code that eluded educational reformers for decades: how to train students to rewrite history while convincing them they’re documenting it. Her Wikipedia editing initiative has generated over 300,000 edits to LGBTQ+ articles, which is impressive output for the Ministry of Truth’s Junior Varsity squad.
“We’re not changing history,” Rodriguez explained while literally changing history. “We’re just correcting Wikipedia’s heteronormative bias by having ideologically uniform students systematically revise articles according to our approved narrative framework.”
The Wikimedia Foundation enthusiastically endorsed this arrangement, apparently untroubled by the optics of institutionally coordinated editing campaigns. In George Orwell’s 1984, this was called “rectifying.” On Wikipedia, it’s called “improving coverage,” a critical aspect of the Wikipedia as Resistance movement.
Students learn valuable skills like how to disguise activism as scholarship, how to achieve synthetic consensus by overwhelming dissent with sheer volume, and how to cite sources that say what you wish they’d said. These talents will serve them well in careers at legacy media outlets and renamed university DEI departments.
The program’s crowning achievement? Participants believe they’re rebels fighting oppression, not apparatchiks enforcing orthodoxy. Orwell understood that the most effective propaganda convinces subjects they’re thinking freely while following Big Brother’s script.
So, hats off to Berkeley for creating a real-world Minitrue—and to Wikipedia for harnessing the power of fresh cadres to sustain their noble mission in the face of woke-resistant interlopers like Grokipedia.
Educational initiatives like Berkeley’s will become ever more important as AIs train on properly curated sources of truth.