User:Historian22lbc/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I thought I may have biases in it that come from a Eurocentric perspective. The article matters because the topic is important to the formation of modern American nations. My preliminary impression of the article was it offered a lot of valid information on how the Spanish was able to use Native people to attain their goals of conquest.

Evaluate the article
The article has a strong lead section that offers a brief but thorough overview of what led to the conquering of the Aztecs in what is now Mexico. The articles content was relevant to the topic and seem to be up to date. The articles content does attempt to address the equity gap by offering perspectives of the conquest from an Indigenous perspective when explaining how Native people felt about their contact with the Spanish.

The article seems to have a neutral tone and balance, offering information from both Spaniards and Indigenous actors, but there are parts that cite how older historians interpreted documents from Native populations that seem to diminish their importance. But for the most part the article does not try to persuade the reader to accept one narrative over the other.

While the article does offer many secondary sources, there are some links to sources used that I am not sure are credible - websites, blogs, or articles by people I am unfamiliar with.

The article is well written using a professional tone, correct spelling and punctuation, is organized into subtopics and events, and it is fairly easy to read and comprehend. The images used are visually appealing and aid in offering information of regions and renderings of events being discussed. All images seem to adhere to Wikipedia regulations and contain captions that help explain the images.

On the talk page there were some that felt the inclusion of places outside of modern day Mexico should have not been included in this article, but placed into a separate article about places south of Mexico. I think the inclusion of places like modern day Guatemala should be okay to include in this article because there was contact and communication with modern Mexico and were impacted during the same period by the same people being examined.

I think this article has more strengths than weaknesses. The article offers valuable information that can help readers get a firm understanding of the interaction between the Spanish, Aztecs, and other Indigenous people of what is now the Americas. It is a lot of information for one article, but there was many things and people that were impacted by the Spanish invasion of the Americas so the amount of information is understandable. The article seems to be well developed and offers information in an orderly manner.