Critiquing Wikipedia Entries

Estevanico was an amazing, resilient person who lived a difficult life and is deserving of coverage on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, his Wikipedia page is not fantastic. The first problem I noticed was a problem with the sourcing. The Wikipedia page has a good amount of important information but unfortunately the majority of that information comes from a few sources while the majority of the sources are only there to provide citation for a single sentence or detail. As I continued to read, I was distracted by the short but necessary tangent about Juan Garrido. Next, I couldn’t help but feel that the article did not focus on Estevanico, it seemed to focus on the group of four men from the Narvaez expedition. I understand that because Estevanico was a slave, there is less information about him but if the vast majority of the article focuses on the group of four that survived the Narvaez expedition, then the article should not pretend to be about Estevanico. The final thing that I noticed while reading the Wikipedia page on Estevanico was that the author of the page had poor grammar that didn’t seem appropriate for academic writing.

When I finished reading the Wikipedia article, I moved on to look at the sources. It was difficult for me to evaluate many of the sources because many of them were print and, at the moment, I do not have the time or the energy to track down those print sources to find information on Estevanico. That being said, none of the sources appeared to be blatantly biased and all seemed to be reliable enough to provide the information used on the Wikipedia page. All of the online sources that I could evaluate were good sources except for one. The fifth source in the bibliography was actually a pdf of a copyrighted source which is illegal and should not be on Wikipedia unless the copyright has expired. The last thing I looked at when evaluating this article was the talk page. There was not a ton of activity on the talk page but it did look like multiple people had contributed to the page, updating it, formatting it, and adding sources but unfortunately there was no banner from a Wikipedia reviewer.  Overall, this was a fine article but maybe should be edited to focus more on Estevanico and to fix the gramar.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *