Subcomandante Marcos

The article I have chosen is the one on Subcomandante Marcos. It is in three WikiProjects: WikiProject Mexico, WikiProject Biography / Military, and WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In all three of these, the article is ranked B-Class and in quality, and Mid-importance in importance.

The balance of information in the article is good. The sections on his popularity and relations with the Inter Milan soccer club are very short, the sections on his writings and his life prior to the Zapatistas are of moderate length, and the longest section is his role in negotiations during the Zapatista Crisis of the 1990s.

However, the section on the Zapatista crisis is rife with errors and just poorly made. It focuses very much on the negotiations Marcos made with the Mexican government, which is understandable, as the bulk of the information on the fighting should not be on Marcos’s personal page, but it includes nothing of his other military actions.

Many statements made in this section are uncited, or very clearly biased. The second paragraph includes the phrase “The facts seemed to confirm”, when that paragraph is completely without citations. The most egregious piece of this article is under the subsection titled “Executive decision.” The paragraph concerns value statements, such as referring to certain decisions as “politically and honorably correct”, and is completely free of citations for statements like “[President] Zedillo avoided innocent bloodshed”, which itself is also somewhat a value statement.

With regards to the citations, many are either in Spanish or behind a paywall, if they are even there at all. The citations which are best paraphrased and sourced are the ones that are used as biographical information on Marcos’s life, such as citations 7 and 8.

The talk page has very little discussion, with only four posts made by users. One user in 2016 mentioned that they were working on a re-boot of the page, but it doesn’t seem to have arrived.

Little information is given on the page about more recent events, such as Marcos’s role in contemporary Zapatista struggles, or his experiences as spokesperson for the Zapatistas during The Other Campaign. There is nothing in the body of the article about Marcos post-2006.

The information differs from what we have talked about in class, as it focuses more on the man Marcos than the Zapatista struggle itself.

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