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.

Critique over “Estevanico” in Wikipedia.

The wikipedia page for Estevanico is informative as well as well-illustrated, though, some parts of the illustration may seem a little imprecise.

When I first took a glance at the wikipedia page for Estevanico, I was astounded to see there is only little information about the one of the four survivors of the expedition compared to other surviving expeditioners in the wiki page. However, when I dig through the page and other materials concerning about other survivors, I understand why. Estabanico was a slave to a Spanish noble when he conduced the expedition.That means it was actually meaningless for the people at that time to write a descriptive illustration of his life and his experience on the voyage. Therefore, I understand why there is literally nothing about him compared to lengthy description of ÁLVAR. Even the book “a land so strange”, which is considered an important book to give great insights and a large amount of information to the readers about the expedition, only have one sentence for him, “only four surviveD Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and Estebanico. No wonder why there is little introduction about him in the wiki-page.

The wikipedia, indeed, gives a relatively informative description about Estebanico. It has four sections regarding the black slave “Estebanico”, from early life to its representation in other media. The wikipedia gives us brief summary of the life of Estabanico, and a lot of information for Estabanico regarding his identity as the American Explorer. It serves to demonstrate his voyage life as the explorer. In my opinion, the wikipedia editors have done a great deal to try to enrich the information for Estabanico. But, in debating whether he was the first black African to set foot on the continent of America, the editor only says that “some books claim him to be the first to land in U.S”, while he gives us the link of the black African who has completed the expedition before Estabanico. The editor does not provide us with which books are saying Estabanico was the first one. In my opinion, this could be inferred as not writing the information in a neutral stance or probably the editor is writing based on facts. The way the editor writing the article about Estabanico on wikipedia probably contradicts the basic idea that all information on Wikipedia should be based on facts and on a neutral standpoint.

Except for some little mistakes, the passage still succeed in giving us a well-demonstrated introduction.

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.

I read the article Álvar Núñez on wiki and all of the information seemed to be on point with the topic and relevant. The article talks about Álvar Núñez in a comprehensive way it gives a very broad non-selective view of him without declaring any opinion on him or portraying im in any one individual’s perspective. The article while being fairly long gives and gives a lot of detail it hits a lot of the important facts about Álvar Núñez that people may want to read the article to quickly find fun facts (i.e birth/death dates, parents names, resting place etc.) The article is also broken down into very topic specific sections that stay on target and make it easy to find specific information about Álvar Núñez. Within these sections there is a lot of important need to know facts about where he explored, what he discovered, who “funded” him and his crew. As I read I realized almost every key person, artifact or place in his life had a working link attached so the reader could completely understand him and the things he did by learning deeper into each individual milestone or event. None of the links or sources are outdated as far as I can tell all of the information in them were still relevant. A Lot of the questions on the talk about it page have been addressed or added to the article which is good and reinforces the the fact that the article is up to date, also on person asked about the origin of where he got the name Cabeza de Vaca and ask is the story about him getting it from his ancestors just a “charming story” or was that actually how that came to be his name. The person who presents the question suggest it may be more likely he got the name Cabeza de Vaca because his mother was from the village Cabeza la Vaca in what today is Badajoz. Some one also states that they believe that the articles rating should be higher rated than its current rating of low importance. This was a very solid article and in my opinion it hit all if the needed marks i feel are required on Álvar Núñez to be a good source of information.

The wikipedia article on the Narváez expedition was informative, although obviously less so than A Land So Strange. However, the talk page brought up some interesting points that I wouldn’t have considered myself. Technically the Narváez expedition ended with Narváez’s death, but the iconic part doesn’t occur until after his demise. One commenter suggested that wikipedians could just write as much about the de Vaca journey on the Narváez expedition page as they could, and then break it up into two separate Wikipedia pages, one for the Narváez expedition and one for de Vaca journey. Interestingly, that never happened and the page is more heavily skewed towards the de Vaca journey.

At the top of the article it has a little window saying that it needs citations for verification. The citations and links the article did have all worked, although I think the references section is longer than the footnotes sections, which seems slightly problematic. The article isn’t rated, and it’s missing what I consider to be considerable information in the South Texas and Southwestern Northern America sections. It isn’t very clear and it has some gaps in events and time. Other than that, it seems neutral to me, although there hasn’t been a ton of heavy editing since it was written it seems.

When reading and evaluating the Wikipedia page on Estabanico, I noticed a few things:

The talk page only contained a few entries. One contained an immature comment and only one truly followed Wiki guidelines and include what was changed as well as an explanation.

Although Estavanico’s wiki page is short it does contain a few sources with credibility. The sources I looked up included passages from books and websites from organization. The links I clicked also lead to other wiki pages which defined words or nouns that were brought up throughout the article.

I felt that Estavanico’s early life was missing from the wiki page. The page seemed to only include his ethnicity (which was also questionable on the page) and his life from after her was sold to slavery. The page focused it’s majority on his journey through New Spain and with the four survivors till his death.

The page does not include any viewpoints from Estabanico himself.

The page does not seem to be openly bias but the fact that it did not include Estabanico perspective can lead one to see the bias. The page focused on Estabanico journey with the other four survivors but did not focus on him alone.

The page appears to be maintained since the last revision was made on August 1, 2017.

As I read the article about Álvar Núñez, I didn’t seem to see anything that wasn’t of relevance to the article topic. The article goes through everything about Álvar Núñez without any bias or distractions from the main point of the article. the article is very lengthy and packed full of info about who he is, what he’s done, the people he’s met, things he’s discovered, and the problems that came along with each expedition. All of the citations, links, and the sources really help the reader understand the article better. Nothing seems to be out of date source wise and in the talk page they all seem to be honestly trying to fix some problems about some things like why some sources spell Cabeza de Vaca, “Cabeca de Vaca” and some thought of it to be of an older version of Portuguese language where the “c” and “z” were interchangeable in some cases. The article was rated as Low-Importance in the U.S. and this was also talked about in the talk page in the effort to try and raise the rating from low-importance to of something of a higher rating. This article differs little from how we talk in class as we tend to touch on a lot of good subjects that most people wouldn’t think about. Overall a good article.

Wikipedia’s article about Estevanico, while informative, it does not include any information about the subject during the voyage, prior to being separated from the rest of the crew. In addition, the article is riddled with assumptions and opinions different sources have drawn through their own experience and research, without going into detail. To expand on this, the article mentions how some speculate the Kachina figure, Chakwaina, is based on Estevanico, however the article fails to mention why this assumption has been made. At the beginning of the section titled “North American explorer,” the author notes that “many books claim Estevanico became the first black person from Africa known to have landed in the present continental United States,” but fails to detail which books have made such claims. Immediately preceding this, the article claims that Estevanico was not the first African to have traveled to present day USA, but gives no evidence nor a citation as to where this information is coming from.

Although all the citations listed are legitimate, not all are referenced in the article, leading me to believe that some were used to write the article, but simply not given credit where credit is due.

However short the article on Estevanico may be, it contains a surprising amount of gaps and flaws within the short amount of text in contains, and therefore is in need of revision, or possibly, more critical review prior to its release or inclusion of edits made later on.