User:Saucybeans

Bio

About Me

In simple terms, I would say that I'm a stereotypical teenage girl you see in movies who enjoys things like makeup, fashion, and gossiping about boys. Although, I do also enjoying playing video games, even though I suck really bad at them. I think the only game that I'm decent at playing is minecraft but I mostly just go around mining for treasure and staying away from any of the "bad guys". I'm doing running start as a way to gain more control in my life and I'd like to say I really enjoy going to college. I'm thinking of pursuing dental hygiene after school because it’s something I’m interested in and not to mention that Washington state is one of the top 3 highest-paying states for dental hygienists.

My Wikipedia interests

I never really knew how Wikipedia even worked so I never had an interest in it, but now I think I would like to see if I can dig up some information on things that aren't so well known. I don't have anything in mind specifically but maybe something in the makeup realm like how it came to be and how different cultures used it in the past. I am also super interested in true crime so that could be another option.

Article Evaluation

I originally was going to try and choose an article involving the dental hygiene field but every link that I would click would be very informative. I then went to get pizza and I had mazapans, a Mexican candy, in my car which gave me the idea to do a Mexican dish. I would look up the basic dishes my mom makes at home but they would also be up to date with loads of information on them. From the taquitos Wikipedia page, I found the word tortilla and clicked just to view it then eventually it lead me to masa. I visited the masa article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: its lack of citations, information on how masa is made and used, and the history of how masa came to be.

Citations

From just viewing the Wikipedia page for masa, it was mainly the chemical part of how maize was created into the flour that makes masa. The first thing I quickly realized after reading about the chemistry behind masa was that there was a huge lack of resources. The articles only had 3 resources that dated back from 1975 to 2004. These were incredible out of date and even the retrieval dates were dated far back to 2013. I also realized in the "Other uses" section there were no citations to where they got the information from. I think it would be more reliable and helpful to get resources that are made more recent as well as find credible articles that talk about the ways to use masa to cite.

Info

Although there was a bit of information on how the masa was prepared chemically, I think they could have added the different ways to make the masa. I know from personal experience that usually you make masa at home by buying masa flour and then adding water to the actual dough to use or it can be used more as a way to thicken drinks, like atole, not really for taste. With that being said, there is definitely a lack of information on how to make the masa so it can be used in different hispanic dishes and they are more just listing what you can make with masa without providing resources.

History

The masa article also failed to mention the history behind masa and doesn’t tell the readers where or how masa came to be. I was able to find an article that briefly talks about when masa rose to create things like tortillas and tamales. Masa most likely originated in Mexico around 3000 B.C where corn started to be domesticated. I think that if I were able to find a little bit of information about how masa originated that it wouldn’t be super hard to find some accurate articles that talk about when it was made and how it evolved over time.

Conclusion

To end this, I would say that this article needs help and needs to be updated. It was not reliable as there were no citations that dated later than 2004 and considering there were only 3 in total you would expect them to be at least up to date. There was also no history of how masa was ever even created and I don't think it would be too hard to find some resources that not only talk about how masa was made but also how it was spread to different places and affected history. I say this because to this day dishes like tamales, which are primarily masa dough and meat, are still very popular to this day and without the creation of masa, we would never have that connection between our culture.