Academic Journals claim to assure the quality of their content by a process of rigorous peer review. Basically that means all submissions are subject to a detail review by at least two leading scholars in the field. This process is done blind so the reviewers should not know the identity of the author. The process is key to both selecting what gets published and to assuring those who subscribe to the Journal that the published material is of the highest academic quality.
University Lecturers penalise students referencing Wikipedia on the basis that anyone can make an entry and it lacks the credibility and intellectual rigour of "proper" academic sources. So how good is peer reviewed material and how does it compare with Wikipedia?
In preparation for next year's teaching I was reading an article by Paul Klenowski published last year in the
Contemporary Justice Review entitled
"Peacemaking Criminology: etiology of crime or philosophy of life?" (subscription required) Whilst reading it I came across this claim
In fact, the Quakers who essentially founded America, who are commonly referred to as the 'Piligrim Fathers,'
Klenowski cites as his source Hamm (2003)
The Quakers in America.
I am not an expert on American history but his claim that the Pilgrim Fathers were Quakers just didn't ring true so I searched in
Wikipedia to find the claim that:
Mary Fisher and Ann Austin are the first known Quakers to set foot in the New World. They journeyed from England to Barbados in 1656 and then went on to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their purpose was to spread the beliefs of the Friends among the colonists. In Puritan-run Massachusetts the women were persecuted. They were imprisoned and their books were burned.
Wikipedia also advised that the Pilgrim Fathers landed in
1620 and that the Quakerism didn't emerge until the
late 1640s.
So then, if Wikipedia is correct, the Pilgrim Fathers were not only not Quakers, but that the Quakers did not even exist until over quarter of a century after the Pilgrim Fathers landed and indeed the first Quakers didn't arrive until the late 1850s. Indeed on their arrival the communities established by the Pilgrim Fathers were aggressively anti-Quaker burning their books and imprisoning them.
But surely Wikipedia can't be trusted. Klenowski has after all backed up claim by a reference to Hamm's
The Quakers in America. A
cursory glance at Hamm (pages 22-23) on Google books shows that Wikipedia does contain errors, Fisher and Austin were not the first to visit the American Colonies, Elizabeth Harris visited Virginia and Maryland slightly earlier. However Wikipedia is spot on about the reception Fisher and Austin got:
When two women Friends, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, arrived in the Puritan colony of Massachusetts, authorities in Boston immediately seized and imprisoned them, burning their Quaker books and examining them for marks of witchcraft before putting them on a ship to Barbados.'
So 7 out of 10 for Wikipedia.
What about Klenowski, the
Contemporary Justice Review, its editor and their peer reviewers? The evidence suggests none had even a basic grasp of American history or the slightest inclination to accept their limitations and do any research. They could have discovered the poor quality of the article's scholarship by a brief visit to Wikipedia or if they prefer more traditional scholarship by actually reading the books listed as references.
This example is but one of many I come across which shows that the quality control mechanisms for the production of criminological knowledge are very poor. Clearly there is sometimes room for different views, perspectives and understandings. Truth is not always straightforward. But not even the most extreme post-modernist reading of American History can argue that the Pilgrim Fathers were Quakers. Indeed at Hamm points out
Puritans saw in Quakerism an almost unimaginable threat to the society they were trying to build
