Honestly I think it comes from a misunderstanding regarding secondary sources vs primary ones. Wikipedia, as well as encyclopedias and textbooks, are secondary sources. It's not good practice to cite secondary sources without primary ones, but a lot of people (namely, teachers) don't grasp why which leads these sources to get classified as bad.

That, plus Wikipedia is accessible without the usual gatekeeping and money behind what textbooks and encyclopedias have, which adds to the sources "credibility." Money means marketing, including constant email campaigns targeting people like me trying to validate whatever textbook they're peddling. (And in case you wonder if they're evil, they sometimes offer kickbacks to adopt their expensive textbooks for my university classes).

Fedi users already get that, though, as that's a common problem FOSS usually has. Point is, wiki lives in a weird place because no, you shouldn't cite it just like you shouldn't cite textbooks, but yes, it's perfectly valid so long as you check those sources. And, speaking from experience, some students really don't understand as I see citations for so much worse.

Nah fuck this attitude, if you ever tried to use Wikipedia for an actual research project you'll know how dubious those """sources""" can be.

It's actuslly an exercise one of my TA friends sets for students when they're just learning to research things properly. She gives them a claim on Wikipedia and and asks them to find the primary source for it. So they end up spending hours following chains of citations, until they are checking out old books from the library to try and find excerpts that some blog post that was cited in a paper that was cited in a newspaper, that was cited in a different blog post that was cited in another news article that was cited by Wikipedia claims exists, just to find out it doesn't.

But seriously, don't take Wikipedia seriously unless it cites a primary source directly.

Wikipedia is wonderful... for most things.

The main demographic contributing to and editing English Wikipedia are young, highly educated white men from western countries. It will portray on average the bias that most of these people espouse. So it will have racist bias, misogynistic bias and pro-western bias.

That said, it's still probably less misogynistic and less racist and less pro-western than your average outlet, because it filters out some of the most blatant false narratives and propaganda from conservative sources such as FOX.

And than there is the fake toaster inventor who only got found out nearly a decade later because the thought the joke got out of hand

There's a lot of misinformation on Wikipedia too, of many different kinds. Some smaller pages exists purely for someone's PR. I've seen blatantly false (but "verifiable") stuff too but the most common thing is to have pages that are just creative with the truth.

Also sometimes I'll notice an article make multiple different claims that all point to the same source and then check the source and realize it is not a valid source for all of those claims, just some.

And also there's stuff that gets flagged as verified based on extrapolation of data from a combination of sources. For example: one source says "John Doe facing 1 billion dollars fines if found guilty" and another source says "John Doe was found guilty", then the article says "John Doe fined 1 billion dollars after being found guilty" as verified, then you go search the web and find no mention of any fines actually being issued following the verdict.

I once posted a Wikipedia article to r/TodayILearned, and my post went really popular. Someone a few hours later then edited the Wikipedia page to contradict my Reddit post title, reported my post to the subreddit mods, and my post got taken down.

~~A problem with Wikipedia is that experts are not allowed to contribute to their areas of expertise because they're "biased"~~ (see edit below). I know a professor at a top university who used to spend his free time editing Wikipedia outside of his specific area but in his broad area of expertise as a method of disseminating science knowledge to the public. When the higher-up Wikipedia editors found out who he was, they banned his account and IP from editing.

~~Having the lay public write articles works when expertise isn't required to understand something, but~~ much of Wikipedia around science is slightly inaccurate at best. (This is still true, probably owing to the neutral point of view rule [giving weight to fringe ideas as a result] or the secondary source prioritization over primary sources.)

Edit: current Wikipedia editing rules and guidelines would not support this ban, so things appear to have changed. Wikipedia still recommends against primary sources as authoritative sources of information (recommending secondary sources instead), which is not great. But, they explicitly now welcome subject matter experts as editors.

And then there's the scots language wiki;

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia

I registered a domain and wrote an article to try to get a submission through. It worked for a few months, but was removed after that. Very vigilant.

Meanwhile, my cousin and her friend were listed as honorary citizens of our village for a few months.