I am writing this to avoid doing my required reading as per my education, and, so, will probably, again, leave in, like, five minutes, but this is something that I've been thinking about for a while.

There are three notable inaccuracies that I have encountered within my general research put forth by established sources. The first of which is that, up until recently, the CIA World Factbook listed a precise demographical figure for the percentage of ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan, at, I believe, 85.6%, despite there having been no census taken within the country since 1979 due to that it has been within a constant state of war. They made no mention of this on their website.

The second thing that I have noticed is of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Mohammad Zahir Shah, the "Last King of Afghanistan". The article tacitly argues that Zahir Shah established a liberal democratic state that guaranteed the rights of women. While I don't doubt that Shah became a liberal reformer later in life, established a more democratic form of monarchy, and helped to facilitate the development of women's rights while he was in office and later, if you read the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan, you will find that this is just simply patently false. The constitution establishes a constitutional monarchy, one wherein the king is granted powers that could be considered as somewhat absolute, and, so, therefore, one that would drastically differ from something like the governance of Denmark, and makes no mention of women whatsoever. This claim was later repeated within his BBC obituary.

The third thing that I have noticed is that The British Museum explicitly states that Leonid Kannegisser was a Socialist Revolutionary. What we know about Kannegisser is that he was an associate of Boris Savinkov. Though Savinkov was a Socialist Revolutionary, by the time they would have been affiliated, he would have effectively have had joined the White Movement and have become an associate of none other than Sidney Riley, also known as "The Ace of Spies". Kannegisser's affiliation with Savinkov proves absolutely nothing whatsoever. I have read a peer-reviewed journal article that posits that Kannegisser was a Socialist Revolutionary. There, however, is no conclusive evidence for The British Museum to declared for this be the case, as it is still a matter of considerable historical debate. For those of you who don't know, Kannegisser assinated Moisei Uritsky in an act that would set in course to motion the series of events that would lead to the Red Terror. Had the British Museum merely suggested that he could have been a Socialist Revolutionary, I think that that would have been fine, but have just simply stated that he was was just simply in error.

Something that I've also noted in comparing the Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikipedia is that the Encyclopaedia Britannica tends to be comparatively shy on information, if not occasionally willfully omittant. I am of the opinion an annotated citation of Wikipedia that verifies the information in the cited article ought to be permissible within an academic setting. In so far that a person paraphrases or quotes an article with another veritable source, it ought to be considered permissible, particularly when the information given is fairly general.

The greatest academic prejudice, to my estimation, however, is against the allowing of citations from Marxists Internet Archive. It seems extremely doubtful to me that there are any serious concerns over the information given on the website not accurately corresponding to what is written within the texts themselves. Sure, you could claim that, while engaged in a highly specified theoretical dispute over this or that passage, a person ought to use a more reputable translation than that undertaken by the likes of Zodiac or Brain Baggins, but I highly doubt that anyone has interfered with the rigor of such debates by citing the website. For all intensive purposes, I think that it is not only a good source, but a rather valuable one, particularly for anyone researching Marxist theory. As it concerns publishing rights, to me, this is a clear cut case of works that belong in the public domain.

Another common assumption is that a book or article published by a fairly well established company is somehow more veritable than those which have been published otherwise. An article that has been published on someone's blog, though there is a comparative likeliness of such things happening that a person could draw, could very well be better researched, more rigorous, more detailed, and provide more robust information than anything published by a company that is not necessarily subject to peer review. There is only some basis for the claim that something published by HarperCollins contains more accurate information than something that someone has published independently.

The academic process of subjecting journal articles to peer review, to me, does seem to make a certain degree of sense and provide fairly good grounds for considering such information to be somehow better than that which has not undergone such a process. Just about everything else, however, I think, could stand to be called within a certain degree of question. Do we consider information as good by that it is in keeping with a fidelity to some form of truth or by that it is in keeping with the prevailing views of our cultural hegemony? Assuming the former is a more lofty goal, as I do, how, then, does our cultural hegemony effect what we consider as veritable?