User:Karlock/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Aztec Empire - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I'm very interested in pre-colonial Latin American history, and I'm currently taking a class on the history of the Aztecs.

I think it's important to make sure this article is up to date and well managed because there are a great deal of misconceptions about who the Aztecs were.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead Section: The lead section gives a very brief overview of the contents of the article and doesn't appear to have any information that doesn't belong or isn't in the article.

Content: The article is very long and covers a lot about the Aztecs, from warfare to religion and from foundation to destruction. It is hard to decide what is and isn't relevant, as this article seems to serve as a "hub" of sorts for all things Aztec. However, the article may put a little too much information on the section detailing gods and deities.

Tone and Balance: The article actually seems to do a very good job at staying neutral. I didn't see anything referencing the "Cortes was seen as a god" myth, nor were the Aztecs portrayed as especially brutal or savage. On the other side, the Spanish conquistadors weren't portrayed as either benevolent or bloodthirsty.

Sources and References: The sources of this article seem to be good, but perhaps a little out of date-late 1900s and early 2000s-and lacking certain viewpoints. For example, I did not see any reference to work by Camilla Townsend, a historian of Latin America who somewhat recently wrote a book about the history of the Aztecs titled Fifth Sun. Otherwise, I appreciated the attempt to include translated Aztec sources, of which there are very few.

Organization and writing quality: The article is quite easy to read and seems to be about as concise as an article about an entire empire can be. I do question if the "Law" section is in the right place at the end of the article, after the section on religion, though it might be placed there to reflect the relatively little we know about pre-conquest legal systems.

Images and Media: The article does include many images that aid the text in understanding Aztec geography, mythology, etc. They seem to be well captioned and adhere to Wikipedia's copyright policy as far as I am aware.

Talk page discussion: The major discussions seemingly happening on the talk page is the lack of information on Aztec technology and missing citations about Aztec religion. The article has been part of a number of Wiki Edu projects and is rated C-Class. It is also part of four Wiki Projects, the main of which is Mexico.

Overall impressions: I think the article is in a good place right now. It strives on its ability to tackle a wide array of connected subtopics in a concise way while staying on topic, but there are a few sections that seem to get more emphasis than others, such as religion, which could probably have some information moved to its own article. Overall, I think this is a very complete, if slightly over-scoped, article.