Estevanico Wikipedia Article

The Wikipedia article on Estevanico seemed like it was of decent quality. I would say that everything in the article is relevant. It has four subsections after the main introduction: Estevanico’s Early Life, his North American Explorations, other names he is called, and representations of Estevanico in media. All of these sections are relevant to Estevanico’s life and are thus relevant to the article. Additionally, I could not detect any bias in the article. It covered his enslavement and his achievements from a neutral perspective.

I did think the article needed a bit more. While the “North American explorer” subsection gave a detailed but brief account of Estevanico’s travels in North America, the “Early Life” subsection was merely a few sentences. Thus, I felt that the “Early Life” section was a bit underrepresented. However, one must consider that Estevanico lived a couple hundred years ago, and because he was a slave, historians today may have trouble finding much information about his childhood and specifically his life.

Some citations are good and some are not as good. In the “Early Life” section there is a citation after a sentence saying that Estevanico’s skin color was described as ‘brown’, however there is nothing about his skin being brown in the article that was cited there. Another sentence in the article states that some historians suggest that the Zuni did not believe Estevanico was a representative of a party of white men, and that he was killed for demanding turquoise, but the citation after that statement does not mention turquoise once. Also, that statement doesn’t specify which historians suggest such things. The sources that the article references don’t seem to be too outdated. One source the article draws from was last updated in 2010, which seems pretty outdated but is pretty new when one considers that Estevanico lived and died several hundred years ago.

All things considered, it is a decent article, but it could use a lot of work. I feel like the article should be a lot more detailed and be lot longer, but I’m assuming part of the reason why it isn’t longer is because of a lack of information about Estevanico and his life.  However, there’s no excuse for bad citations.

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