User:Pegg SL/sandbox

Introducing the Articles
Wikipedia’s article on Carl Jung is very extensive. The article can be divided up into the following five sections: introduction, biography, psychology, political views, and cultural influence. Most of the information is given in the biography section, which contains 18 subheadings from “Youth” to “Last publications and death”. "Psychology" is the second largest section with 8 subheadings, followed by "Cultural influence" with 6 subheadings, and "Political views" with 3 subheadings.

Overall, the article provides a vast amount of information, perhaps more than what is needed for an encyclopedia article, as it is my understanding that an encyclopedia is meant to provide an introduction to a subject. Rather than providing an introduction to Carl Jung, Wikipedia’s article does the work of a research paper. It can be argued that a very lengthy article like this eliminates the point of ready reference, as it can take up to an hour to read through all the information that is given. However, there are tools that can overcome this issue, such as the browser's search function that allows users to search for one word within the article. Also, the article includes excellent sub headings that allow the user to narrow a search by guessing which sections might contain the information needed. The article also contains many hyperlinks which allow users to easily follow a trail if the information is not included in the article.

The BritannicaOnline article on Carl Jung provides much less information than Wikipedia’s. The article opens with a brief introduction to Carl Jung, consisting of 2-3 sentences. Additionally, the article only contains three subheadings: Jung’s early life and career, his association with Freud, and the character of his psychotherapy. The most in-depth of these is the section on Jung’s psychology which is 5 paragraphs long. Next is Jung’s association with Freud, which contains 3 paragraphs, and, lastly, the shortest section summarizes Jung’s early life and career in two very brief paragraphs.

Overall, the article seems too brief. BritannicaOnline seems to over-simplify in its explanations and leave out significant details that are necessary to provide a thorough introduction to a subject. For instance, the names of Jung’s parents are not included in Britannica’s article. This information can be extremely helpful in imparting who Carl Jung was because it reveals where he came from, and allows one to trace his family history.

There seems to be no happy medium between the dense Wikipedia article and the underdeveloped BritannicaOnline article. On the one hand Wikipedia gives a truckload of information that is hard to read through, while on the other hand Britannica's article appears to only skim the surface, leaving out key details. The rest of this assignment will expand on initial criticisms and present an overall evaluation of the quality of each article. The review of the articles will be broken down into two parts: organization and quality of inforamtion, and sources, contributions and history.

Wikipedia’s Subheadings
Well-designed subheadings are very important, especially when dealing with large amounts of information, as they make it easy to navigate through dense articles to find the information that you need. An encyclopedia allows quick access to information on many subjects, so helpful subtitles is a large factor in determining the quality of an encyclopedia article.

Wikipedia’s article contains many headings and subheadings, and it appears to be very well organized at first glance. However, a closer look at these subheadings gives a split view, and reveals that this article provides examples of helpful subheadings and less helpful subheadings.

Helpful subheadings
The section on Psychology demonstrates good subheadings. They are concise, accurate, and without bias. Section 4.3, “Individuation” contains information on individuation only. There is no divergence into other fields of his psychology, and the section simply relays information collected on the subject without inserting opinions. This same evaluation can be made for all the subsections on Jung’s Psychology. . These are helpful subheadings because they allow someone reviewing the table of contents to click the link and not be misled, or confused once they begin reading the section.

Poor subheadings
It has been mentioned that Jung’s biography includes 18 parts. Having many subheadings can be useful, but in the case of Jung’s biography they seem to cause confusion, and contain flaws that compromise the quality of the article.

My criticism stems from the section of Jung’s biography titled “Midlife isolation”. In my opinion this heading is misleading. Firstly, the nine subsections that follow do not focus solely on his midlife. In fact, the last subsection is titled “Last publications and death”. Secondly, none of the subsections in “Midlife isolation” suggest any overbearing sense of “isolation” that Jung experiences, except for one, titled “Isolation”. In fact one subsection of Jung’s apparent midlife isolation describes a trip to East Africa where he interacted with many different cultures to develop his psychological theories. In order for a heading to be helpful, everything within it should be connected to what the heading professes. From reading the heading one immediately assigns a special importance to all of its terms. Midlife triggers an indication that a lot happened with Jung in his midlife to warrant a separate section in his biography, and that all of the information that follows will apply to that. Isolation suggests that Jung went through a significant stage of isolation that changed his life, or developed his perspectives, and, again, that all the following information will apply to that. When reviewing the section, these two terms act as a reference point to give the content context within the greater picture of Jung’s life. When the heading is discordant to the information, interpretations can be skewed, and the article as a whole loses credibility.

It is significant to note that "Midlife isolation" and most of its current subsections have been present in the article for at least one year. These are very simple and obvious discords between a heading and the information it contains. These flaws suggest poor editing by the contributors to the page.

Britannica’s subheadings
It has already been mentioned that Britannica’s article only contains three subheadings: “Early life and career”, “Association with Freud”, and “Character of his psychotherapy”. In comparison with the breadth of topics that Wikipedia covers, there is an immediate suspicion that Britannica’s article is not organized in a way that sufficiently summarizes Jung’s life. While some subsections that exist on Wikipedia are not expected to appear on Britannica, such as “London 1913-14”, it is fair to suggest that Britannica’s subheadings could be improved. Mainly, “Association with Freud” seems reductive, and suggests that this relationship is one of three most notable aspects of Jung’s life. This is especially misleading because only one third of this section talks about Freud at all. The rest discusses other aspects of Freud’s career after he and Freud part ways.

These may seem like minor details, but they are actually very significant misrepresentations that can leave a lasting impression on users. For instance, it is very possible that a high school student would leave this article thinking, “Carl Jung was a psychotherapist who is known for his collaboration with Freud”. This is only partly true, as Jung’s and Freud’s theories actually diverge greatly, and the peak of Jung’s career came after he broke away from Freud. Or, if a professional researcher notices this he or she may not go to BritannicaOnline as a source in the future.

Differences between Britannica and Wikipedia
Although Britannica’s subheadings are scarce, most of the subjects covered in Wikipedia that are central to Jung’s life and career are mentioned in Britannica’s article as well. The difference is that what is presented on Wikipedia as a specific subheading is presented on Britannica in one or two sentences within its more general sections. For instance, Wikipedia’s section 1.1.2, “Childhood Memories” describes incidents in Jung’s life that had a “lasting impression” on his outlook. Wikipedia gives extensive details regarding these memories by providing examples, such as this one: “Jung claimed that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from [his mother’s] room, with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body”. The article also gives context to Jung’s visions by describing the atmosphere of his childhood home. For instance, it imparts that his mother suffered from mental illness and was often in and out of a mental institution. All of these claims regarding his childhood memories are supported by primary sources written by Jung, and were added to the article long ago with little to no disputes, which is a testament to their accuracy.

Britannica’s article does not provide examples of Jung’s uncanny visions as Wikipedia does. Memories of the supernatural are encompassed in this brief mentioning: “His childhood was lonely, although enriched by a vivid imagination”. Britannica also provides limited context; it gives some information on his father’s occupation and parenting, but tells nothing of his mother’s mental illness. .

Regarding Jung’s many theories, Wikipedia dedicates several paragraphs to each theory. Britannica seems to extract the most significant details of the theory to provide a concise summary in one or two sentences. For instance, Wikipedia describes Jung’s theory of individuation in 136 words, whereas BritannicaOnline describes it in 74.

Wikipedia’s Sources
Wikipedia’s list of citations is impressive. There are 86 citations throughout the article. These 86 citations include approximately 60 different sources. Of these 60 sources 10 are primary sources, 45 are secondary sources from an authoritative source, and 5 are secondary sources from websites with no authority. Contributors cite many primary sources to provide accurate information, especially in regards to the biography.

There are very few claims that do not provide citations. I spent some time scrutinizing the article for an example: “After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed”. Here, there is absolutely no citation, but there are very few of these throughout the article.

I found a couple of instances like this, where a claim is not supported by any evidence, but provides hyperlinks to lend authority to the claim: “The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of personality typology”. Sure enough, Wikipedia’s page on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has a picture of Carl Jung with the caption: “Myers and Briggs extrapolated their MBTI theory from Jung's writings in his book Psychological Types”

BritannicaOnline’s sources
Surprisingly, there is no list of sources in the BritannicaOnline article that I could find, nor does the article include any in-text citations. The article gives only a list of “Additional Reading” that can be done on Carl Jung. This list contains four books: two biographies on Jung, and two books that feature a collection of his works. The article also provides a list of “Related Articles” with hyperlinks to other Britannica articles.

Wikipedia’s contributors and article history
Wikipedia’s open edit system is no mystery to the common individual. Anyone with a Wikipedia account can edit any article, and articles are kept up to date and free from vandalism by the high frequency of users reviewing articles and watching for misconduct. There is complete transparency in the process, as the history of each article is accessible, along with the names and profiles of anyone who has contributed to the article. The history of Carl Jung’s article is difficult to trace; hundreds of edits have been made over the course of 12 years. The article was created in 2001. It consisted of five paragraphs, and no subheadings. Like BritannicaOnline’s current article, Wikipedia’s 2001 article on Jung principally identifies Jung as a disciple of Freud, and then focusses on some of the famous theories of his psychology. The more precise details of his biography, schooling, and cultural influence are missing in the entry. . The article goes through drastic changes throughout its history. Mid-2003 the article begins to grow in length, reaching over 2000 words. I compared the article as it existed in June 2003 to the current version and it seems not a trace of the former remains; the article has completely transformed since its creation. The high volume of changes being made makes it hard to find precise points when changes were made to the article. The recent contributors to the article seem to be mostly random users with no shared information regarding any particular expertise they may have on subject relatable to Carl Jung. The last major contribution to the article was made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cobi, who seems to have experience editing in the Wikipedia world.

BritannicaOnline’s contributors and article history
BritannicaOnline works similarly to Wikipedia, in that any user can create an account and “suggest” an article, or edits to an article. Britannica edits are submitted to an official editor for review before they are posted. At the bottom of the article, there are two names, Michael S.M. Fordham and Frieda Fordham. These are the article’s main contributors; they wrote the article, and it was published to BritannicaOnline in 2006. Since this publishing date, the article has only been edited six times, by three users. These users are all official editors for BritannicaOnline. The editors have profiles that you can view that tell users about their areas of expertise and a list of all the articles that they contribute to. The profiles also tell what position that editor holds at Britannica, for instance one editor of Carl Jung’s article is a Senior Editor in Philosophy. All of the edits to Jung’s article seem to be fix-up edits, changing small details such as grammar mistakes, dates, or word choice. Between the article’s creation in 2006 and the last edit in 2012, the article seems exactly the same at first glance. What can this tell us about Britannica’s system of editing? It means that Britannica does not need to worry about false information being shown to users, everything is approved by an expert before it is published. It can be argued that the limited amount of edits seen on this article is a disadvantage because it may not be receiving updates regarding new research in the field. However, the article’s history shows that one edit made in 2009 added a small paragraph about a book published that year containing the first look at a manuscript written by Jung in 1914.

Conclusion
In review, each article seems to have its merits and weaknesses.

Wikipedia provides a lot of information, and this requires the user to take a bit of time in finding the answer. While many subject headings make it easier to find information, some are improperly labeled which can confuse the reader. Overall, the flaws in the article’s organization and density do not compromise the quality of the article. The article uses a wide range of credible sources, which means that the information is sound. I would recommend this source to an individual as a starting point for research on Carl Jung or psychoanalysis.

Britannica’s article presents a concise look at Carl Jung’s life and his significance in the field of psychoanalysis. Information contained in the article is sound and more reliable than Wikipedia’s because it is approved by editors before being published. However, because each article is reviewed by an expert editor there is little justification for sub-par standards of article writing that have been exposed, such as reductive headings that can mislead a user or ambiguous wording that leaves question marks in the reader’s mind. Also, the fact that there are no citations throughout the article reflects poorly on the editors of this page. In the end, I would not recommend the BritannicaOnline article as a starting point for research. It is too brief, it lacks unity because of its poorly designed layout of three sections, and it does not provide a comprehensive list of further readings.