Wikipedia

I read the article “Latin America-United States Relations” on Wikipedia. Instead of presenting both the U.S. and Latin American perspectives, the article focuses on the actions and plans of the U.S. toward Latin America. This is supported by the fact that the U.S. is often used as the subject in the content, as well as the larger proportion on U.S. foreign policies.

Apart from its perspective, the fact included in the article is not always referenced with reliable sources. A good example of this is the “19th Century to World War I” section. While there are hyperlinks to specific people and issues, the description of the treaties and processes are not cited. Despite most of the sections in the article are related to Latin America-United States Relations, some of them like “Academic Research” are not directly related.

In terms of the neutrality of the article, I think it is okay in general. But some of the content might seem to be biased. For example, the article mentions that most of the 10 million illegal immigrants are of Hispanic origins and these immigrants would send money back home. Not only are the statistics not cited, but the remarks of immigrants sending money is also pretty biased.

When it comes to the sources, most of them are working well. But some of them are only linking to the author’s Wikipedia page but not the book. Some of the sentences also seemed to be closely paraphrased. For example, the sentence “Latin America is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States and its fastest-growing trading partner, as well as the largest source of drugs.” is similar to the sentence “It is the United States’ fastest-growing trading partner, as well as its biggest supplier of illegal drugs” from the original source. On top of that, the sources used are not really updated. Some of the books and journal articles cited are from the 90s. In addition, there is no message posted on the talk page of the article. So, it is hard to trace the conversations going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic. The article is also not in WikiProjects.