Blog Post: Critiquing Wikipedia’s Coverage of Brazilian History

After reading the Wikipedia article, “Indigenous Peoples in Brazil,” the first things I noticed was how factual everything was as the article lists a ton of facts that are very interesting, however there is no real argument being made by the authors of the article. This is in stark contrast to the outside readings we had about indigenous people in Brazil such as the article, “Cannibals: Iberia’s Partial Truth.” This article is also jam packed with information however, the author, Patricia Seed, actually has an argument and does not just lay out fact after fact. In addition, there is some obvious bias in her writing which was not found in the Wikipedia article as that sort of language and tone is banned from Wikipedia. I found everything to be relevant and I feel like the subheadings helped guide me to different sections of the article that looked to be interesting. I am not familiar with the history of indigenous peoples in Brazil so I am unable to verify if the article contained information about all of the different groups that would have been indigenous to Brazil.

There are a few sections that need to have citations at the end of each sentence because they are obviously not original thoughts from the author. For example, at the beginning of the section, “The Jesuits: Protectors of the Indians,” writes ” The Jesuit priests, who had come with the first Governor General to provide religious assistance to the colonists, but mainly to convert the Pagan people to Catholicism, took the side of the Indians and extracted a Papal bull stating that they were human and should be protected.” This is most definitely not the author’s original thoughts so there is a citation needed at the end of the sentence.  In fact, the majority of the article does not have citations and the ones that do are not properly cited as they lead to invalid websites when clicked on such as the website listed for footnote 13. As stated earlier, the article is not written with any bias and the article is very neutral.  The article is within the scope of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas and it is also within the scope of WikiProject Brazil. It is rated as a C-Class on the project’s quality scale.

After reading Patricia Seed’s article and the article titled ” “Bandeirantes, Natives, & Indigenous Slavery” it looks as if the “Slavery and the bandeiras” section could use a lot more information. As of now, there are only 2 very small paragraphs which only contains information about the sugar trade and the Portuguese influence in the slave trade. The authors could have added information about  the other countries  that colonized Brazil that Patricia Seed mentioned in her article. It looks as if there has been a lot of activity on the talk page as some of the people who have viewed the site have expressed their thoughts via the talk page such as the one person who noted that the “Religion Figures are Wrong.” Overall, the page contains plenty of information about the indigenous peoples of Brazil and the content is very neutral, however there are some flaws as there are plenty of citation issues and the authors did not go into much depth into each section as there appears to be a lot of information that was left out.