For me Wikipedia has always been a place of quick reference for things I haven’t quite heard about; however, I’ve never actually evaluated the content on the page. For this reason I am going to evaluate the English page on the Cuban missile crisis. This is a topic I have much knowledge about after doing a paper on it my freshman year. I will evaluate this page based on sources, discussion and history.
By just reading the article, I can tell that the author(s) worked to make the Wikipedia page have as little bias as possible. For every statement there is regarding the hard work of the Americans, there’s also a statement regarding the work of the Cubans/Russians. Another thing I noticed in the discussion is that the page has a lot more background on the reactions and actions of the Americans rather than that of the Russians. After seeing that content I looked towards the sources and noticed that there was not one attributed Russian reference which could be beneficial to the content of the page. As seen in the photo below most, if not all, of the references are from authors and departments of the United States. This really has a great effect on the validity of the article.
When looking over the history of the article I also noticed that much of the history is only attributed to the American viewpoint. This is a result of the sources. I feel if the article showed an equivalent amount of both sides it would be much more useful to people looking to get a grasp on the topic. I would not go as far as saying that the Wikipedia page will be a good reference for information just due to the fact that almost anyone can go in and give there 2 cents to the page. Some might also the page is already long enough and it is not needed; however, without an open viewpoint the page doesn’t serve as a good source of information.