For our critical analysis of a wikipedia article, I chose to look at the wikipedia article for the quipus that we had discussed in class last week.

Upon first glance the article seems well written and contains plenty of sources in the reference section. The most eye catching part of the page, though, is the incredibly brief section on the etymology.  Personally, I believe this piece of information could have been placed in the introduction or in another section.  Some paragraphs on the “Purpose” are missing sources despite being an important part of the information given.  As for the rest of the page, in terms of sources, almost every paragraph contains at least one citation.  There still exists a few paragraph that needs citation involving the literary uses of the quipu as well as the common spelling issue an English.  This stems from the fact that there are many ways people spell quipu, but according to the discussion of the page, wikipedia uses the most common name, which a user noted was “quipu”. Overall, aside from the few problems I believe the article is well written and contains plenty of sources and citations.

I chose to evaluate the Wikipedia article on Inca society because this article is rated start-class on wiki quality scale. This article seemed to have many problems and inconsistencies. Firstly, this article lacked a balance-of-coverage of the many important aspects of Inca society. Although the article was broken down into clear segment headings, there was little information in some areas and an information overload in other areas. The author(s) had large paragraphs on some subjects and just a few sentences on others. The whole article only has four sources and some large sections had no references whatsoever. I tried to view one of the sources and it seems to be a faulty citation of nothing. The author(s) also uses vague and superfluous terminology to describe certain aspects of Incan society.

I chose to review the Wikipedia page for Arepas. Overall, I think that the article has many problems with both the citations and the overall amount of information. On the Talk page there are complaints on the significant lack of citations and there is a lot of discussion about the way in which the ways both Colombia and Venezuela should be discussed because of the long history of the arepa in the upper southern american culture. In addition, there seem to be many people who are putting their own experiences into the article. Overall, I wouldn’t trust a page with so few sources.

The article I have chosen is about the divisions of Inca education and Inca education is general. The article is fairly short with two sub headings. My strongest critique is the article has no cited sources, which is extremely odd due to it being apart of two WikiProjects: Indigenous People of the Americas and Peru.

On the Talk Page, people from all the way back to 2006 have commented on the lack of sources, but no one has added anything. This tells me this page is not visited frequently and is an important reason why there are WikiProjects for the Indigenous People of the Americas and Peru. There are about only three comments on the talk page, and they only involve the lack of sources.

It seems that the article is neutral, but once again, it is difficult to gauge that without the sources. With that being said, the ideas within the article are neither under or over represented. However, there are a few phrases/words that could be linked to other articles, but they are just bolded, so it is difficult to find out more about Inca education.

With the lack of sources, the article should essentially not be trusted. However, it is a decent article with decent information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexica

“Mexica”

I looked at the Mexica people of modern day Mexico, most commonly referred to as the Aztec Empire. The content on this page fits the article adequately, but there seems to be a lack of more prominent information. There are some distractions on the words that have links to them. Words such as Mexico, are linked more than once. The article is missing a lot of information and only has two photos, so it doesn’t have much to distract the reader. Because the article is about a people, I don’t believe there can be a noticeable bias in articles like these.

No viewpoints are overrepresented or underrepresented, there just isn’t enough content to determine that yet. The citations are not at all reliable. There is only one link that actually leads to another site, but when you get to that site it’s just a search engine. The other two sources are inadequately cited. Overall, these sources are not reliable at all.

Most of this information has been added on a course of three years but has yet to be significantly edited. This article has potential to be a growing article, but as of now it remains stub-like.The article is not rated or classified yet, it needs much more information and citations before it becomes a complete article. More or less this article covers the more basic generic information that we discussed in class. It talks about their origin and their location in that colonial era.

The wikipedia article I chose to analyze is the cocoa bean. For the most part, everything appears to be on topic. If there is one thing that stands out from the rest of the article, it would be the section on child slavery. Although not irrelevant, it appears to be less focused on the main topic of the article itself, and shifts tones slightly. This section also appears to be the only section with a somewhat biased tone. Although it initially appears neutral, there is a clear emphasis on articles that point out the controversy with the issue, meanwhile still not trying to sound blatantly persuasive. On the same topic of child slavery, this section appears to have only the perspective of those that may view the issue negatively (although this is somewhat unsurprising).

Overall, the references appear to be functional. All the information seems to be well up to date. The most recent edit was this past August. The discussions occurring on the talk page appear to be a mixture of wondering how the article could be improved and asking for general knowledge on the topic of cocoa. The article has been listed as B-class, though it had previously been rated as good. It is also part of three wiki projects: Food and drink, Africa, and plants.