Wikipedia Critique – Andean Music

For this assignment, I decided to look at the Wikipedia page for Andean music. At the very beginning of the article, there is a notification from Wikipedia warning users that there are no citations anywhere in the article. Right away this damages the credibility of the article, as it means whatever information is present has no way of being verified. Looking at the Talk page for this article reveals that there has been little discourse on the construction of the article, only a handful of users debating the nature of “true” traditional Inca music. There are descriptions given of traditional Andean instruments that have links to many other Wikipedia pages that have a number of citations, which lends some amount of credibility to this section. The “Modern history” section gives broad details about the development of certain musical movements and musicians in the Andean region from the 1960s onward, but it feels very limited in scope and biased towards the promotion of a select few bands. I’m sure there is a rich history of music’s evolution throughout the Andean region, but this article is unable to explore any of it while simultaneously keeping the reader from discovering more outside of the realm of Wikipedia. The history of this article shows that there was, at some point, external links, but were removed over time. Much of the recent work has been provided by one user, adding more connections to other Wikipedia articles. Overall, this article could be interesting to help a reader discover more contemporary musicians from the Andean region, but lacks any sort of intellectual/academic credibility.

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