My reviewer agrees with my intended edits. They also understand that this article is very important to the understanding of the Cuban Revolution. I will continue down the path I have intended to with focusing on the translation and fixing the deadlinks.
The feedback I received was very helpful, and gave me ideas that I had not previously considered, such as adding a photocopy of the newspaper itself. One of the changes I plan for the article is to find sources for the large amount of information marked “citation needed.” I also plan to add information on the newspaper’s impact on the world, and how the world has impacted the newspaper. The feedback to this plan included suggestions to add new headings to the article, and expanding the information and topics already provided in the article, which I plan to do as there is not much information in the article at present.
The feedback was helpful and constructive for my article. Of the suggestions I plan to include a lot of links to make my page more accessible in hopes that it will receive more attention from more seasoned wikipedia scholars. One of my peer reviewers suggested making new sections entirely for my article as the existing sections are small and not necessarily detailed. I will fo sure take this into consideration as I further construct my wikipedia page.
There was only one peer review left on the talk page for my article. The reviewer agreed with many of my points for improvement. They also mentioned that I should clean up the formatting, as there are some empty sections, and make sure the page follows a neutral tone. I will use these suggestions to make sure that any writing I add follows a neutral tone. I will also focus on adding into where there are holes in the article. I will also look to see if there are any broken links that can be fixed. I will also make sure that information in the source is cited properly.
The feedback I received in my three peer review evaluations was mostly positive, with a few elements of constructive criticism. I now plan to differentiate between Espín’s role as a revolutionary overall and her work promoting women’s rights during and after the revolution. I will likely try to find more specific information about her family and how she balanced work with motherhood in addition to transferring existing family information from the lead to a specific section. Having already planned to do so, I will also ensure that use of any biased sources such as those written by Espín or Fidel Castro are presented in context with an acknowledgement of their bias.
How is this aspect of Latin American history represented?
This Wikipedia article is comprised of five sentences, total. All five of those sentences appear to be factual and relevant, describing Hernández’s past and present career and explaining her status as Cuba’s first transgender politician.
Do you see any biases?
The information presented is minimal but relevant, and it all appears to be mostly unbiased. Even less complimentary details about Hernández’s life such as her imprisonment during the 80’s due to transphobic laws are presented in a generally neutral manner.
What kinds of sources are used?
The major problem with this article is that both of the sources used are news articles from 2012 that have since been deleted, leaving all of the information provided essentially without a source. The quality of ABC News and the Vancouver Sun as relevant sources for a Wikipedia article is already questionable, and the fact that both news stories have since been deleted adds further suspicion to the verity of the information being presented.
How might you improve the article to meet Wikipedia’s standards and show your skills of historical research and analysis?
I can improve this article by finding more recent sources, or at least ones that are still in existence; then I can provide citations for what has already been written and hopefully add more unbiased facts about Adela’s career, personal life, political stances, etc. This is a very basic Wikipedia article to begin with, so elaborating on it should be fairly straightforward as long as I can find enough unbiased, good quality sources to synthesize into my own words.
The Wikipedia article that addresses the War of Canudos portrays the small villagers of the Canudos settlement as fanatics who were blindly following some sort of Messiah in hopes of a better future. That is, while the article does touch on the economic depression of the Canudos area and alludes that this might have made the people of Canudos susceptible to promises of a better world, it fails to provide any concrete evidence that would explain why the people of Canudos chose to follow Counselheiro. Later on, the article touches on how the government of Brazil labeled the settlement of Canudos’ people as ideological fanatics who antagonized the current government and blindly followed “one of the many mystic spiritual preachers of the time.” While the editors do not necessarily make blatant, personal statements on their thoughts on the people of Canudos’ arguable fanaticism, their failure to address whether the same people pursued more concrete goals by allying with Counselheiro gives support to the government’s trope. This underlies a systemic bias in that the point of view of the government dominates the article, whereas the ideology and motives of the Canudos peasants are boiled down to delusional aspirations.
On the other hand, the article talks extensively about the War of Canudos’ military history and provides multiple statistics to describe the battles that opposed the settlement and the government without referencing any credible sources. In fact, the sources that are directly referenced in the article seem far from credible and unbiased–one of them being a blog post while the other happens to be a government news website. Even worse, the talks section alludes to the fact that the article may be heavily inspired by a work of fiction by Vargas Llosa about the War of Canudos as the statistics that are presented in the article seem to be too similar to Vargas Llosa’s piece. This casts doubt on the entirety of the article and makes it an unreliable source of information.
I would improve the article by addressing the ideology and the motives of the people of Canudos more extensively in an attempt to give the peasants, which happen to be the underrepresented group, in this case, a voice against that of the Brazilian government. Additionally, I would double-check the numbers that are provided in the article and reference a credible source every time any of those statistics are provided. Finally, I would make sure to incorporate more credible, peer-reviewed, and accessible sources and cite them explicitly in the body of the article.
My chosen Wikipedia article is the Federation of Cuban Women. Everything in the article is relevant to the article topic. Some things that distracted me about the article were the lack of description in the picture on the cover page of the article, as well as the lack of resources in the Bibliography section (only three cited sources). The article is neutral and there are not really any claims that appear heavily biased. The article is short yet concise with the presented information, solely outlining and detailing the events that took place surrounding the topic. An underrepresented viewpoint is that of the founder of the organization, Vilma Espín. There is not much information in the article about her except for the fact that she worked closely with Fidel Castro and the man who would eventually become her husband, Raul Castro. All three of the sources are printed books; there are no links. Each fact is referenced from sources in the Bibliography with no bias noted. There is no out of date information; all included information is in accordance with the referenced sources in the Bibliography. There are no conversations happening in the Talk portion of the article. The article was apparently written as a part of WikiProject Cuba, which is currently inactive. Wikipedia discusses this topic in a similar way to which we have talked about it in class. It mentions the primary stated goals of the Federation of Cuban Women, as well as the pioneers of the movement and how it came to fruition.
The Wikipedia page for the Cuban Literacy Campaign is poorly organized, biased, and in need of more concrete sources of information. The article provides some useful information about the movement’s overall organization and effect, but said information is not presented in a straightforward manner. The section titled “Challenges” contains information that is either irrelevant to the title of the section or irrelevant to the article as a whole. Some of the information is useful to understanding the topic being presented, but it makes up only a couple sentences of the section and is presented in a sensationalized way with poor sources.
The article appears to be biased in favor of the Cuban government, containing many claims that the movement described is the greatest in history. It makes a controversial (if believable) claim regarding U.S. interference in Cuba, but fails to reinforce that claim with concrete evidence. In addition, the article uses several inspirational yet vague quotes from Fidel Castro and other notable leaders in lieu of unbiased description of the topic. This article is representative of only Cuban viewpoints on the movement and its related movements; given that one of the related topics mentioned is expansion of the literacy campaign to other underdeveloped countries, it would be interesting to see the viewpoints of those countries on the subject.
Several of the links do not work; those that do work lead to sources that seem biased or not useful as a scholarly source for an article written in English for English speakers; examples include a couple of poorly translated articles from Cuban news sites and articles published by the Cuban government. The biases of these sources are not noted in the article. The vast majority of claims are cited, but it is hard to analyze the quality of their sources as they are generally books or articles that cannot be accessed online. None of the sources used were published after 2010. This means that any recent developments on the topic of literacy in Cuba have not been added as they occur.
There are only a few conversations on the talk page; two are civil discussions about ensuring the article is linked to versions of it in other languages and making sure statistics are correct, while another is a poorly phrased critique about the article’s bias. The article is rated C-class and low importance, and is included in WikiProject Cuba (inactive) and WikiProject Linguistics.
This Wikipedia article makes little to no effort to present information in an unbiased way, only represents one viewpoint, and does not acknowledge its biases. We have not discussed this topic in depth in class, but if we had one would assume that we would do so in as unbiased and factual a manner as possible.
The writing style is ambiguous at times too many pronouns are used and it is difficult to keep track of what the Wikipedia editors are referring to. The article also overuses passive voice, which makes the content even harder to grasp. Additionally, the article provides many detailed statistics to describe the size of the armies that fought in the War of Canudos, which makes it quite difficult to keep track of the rest of the information that is being presented.
While the article is neutral in tone, it seems to make claims that are not supported by any evidence. For instance, it claims that Canudos’ “spiritual leader and towering figurehead, Antonio Conselheiro, had died on September 22, probably of dysentery and malnutrition provoked by fasting for penance” without referring to any credible source that would support this piece of information.
The article over-represents the misery and poverty in which the people of Canudos lived, but fails to address the characteristics that would have pushed the villagers to fight with Antonio Conselheiro. That is, the article fails to provide any background information on the ideological reasons and beliefs that may have allowed Counselheiro to find supporters in the settlement of Canudos.
All of the links in the bibliography and the references sections of the article work, but only two of them provide access to the content the source in question. The rest of the links only link to Wikipedia pages that provide general descriptions of the sources that are cited within the article. Therefore, it is impossible to check the accuracy of claims that are made in the article unless a physical or an e-copy of the source is obtained.
Most of the sources that are cited in the article are in Spanish, which, added to their inaccessibility, made it impossible for me to check whether the article conforms to the claims that are made in the sources that are cited. However, the talk section suggests that the article seems to rely heavily, and almost exclusively, on a single work of fiction that was written about the War of Canudos. This undermines the credibility of the claims that are made in the article not only because works of fiction do not, by definition, conform to reality, but also because diversifying sources is necessary to avoid biases and the reproduction of misleading information. Furthermore, the body of the article exhibits the label “[citation needed]” twice, which casts even more doubt on the credibility of the piece as a whole. And while some peer-reviewed sources are included in the biography, they are not referred to anywhere in the article itself, which means that the article never references a “credible” source directly and explicitly.
Most of the sources date back to the 20thcentury, which leads me to believe that it may be interesting to incorporate information from more recent sources. Additionally, it would be interesting to add information on the villagers’ ideology and beliefs that led to rally under Counselheiro, race, gender, class differences and involvement, and the role that the catholic church played in the debacle.
The talk section first blames the article for not addressing how the War of Canudos was a “monarchist rebellion.” The author of this comment states that “Antonio Counselheiro blamed the rich landowner who once owned slaves for overthrowing the monarch who kept the people under their grasp,” which points to a piece of information that seems essential to the understanding of the motives lying Counselheiro’s rebellion. Another Wikipedia user suggests incorporating more direct citations rather than relying on a bibliographic summary and underlines the article’s overreliance on a work of fiction. A third Wikipedia user suggests merging a Wikipedia article titled Canudos with the article on the War of Canudos given that the former mostly talks about the history of the War rather than the town itself. A fourth Wikipedia user suggests addressing the catholic church’s involvement in the War. Finally, a fifth Wikipedia user addresses a resolved issue which concerned the use of the words “fanatics” to refer to the people of Canudos. The problem with using these terms, said Wikipedia user claims, was that it constituted “an unsubstantiated value judgment that coincides with the government and media propaganda used during the period concerned to justify the government’s actions.”
The article is within the scope of WikiProject Brazil and is rated as B-class on the project’s quality scale. The article is also within the scope of the military history WikiProject and is rated as C-class on this project’s quality scale.
We have not discussed the War of Canudos in class, but I would imagine that our discussion of such a topic would include a careful examination of how race, gender, class, and ideology have shaped the conflict.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Canudos