How Reliable is Wikipedia?

     Most kids today can say that about 90% of their teachers advise against or prevent them from using Wikipedia as a source. The reasoning behind this is that the site can be edited by anyone and can contain false information. But as someone who reads Wikipedia articles to find out bits of information, I feel like it's not all made up, it just depends on the subject. If I want to know the basic facts on someone like Bill Gates, looking that up on Wikipedia would be fine in my view, because a few mistakes is something I can live with. But if I wanted to write a case study on a rare disease, Wikipedia might not be the place to go because things that are outside the gauge of common knowledge could be false. It also depends on the reader, and how much they actually choose to believe and use as fact later on. A lot of articles actually can link to other sources, so someone could trace things back and find out how accurate they are. The other factor (which I am kind of on the fence about) is that anyone can edit Wikipedia. From what I know, editing articles is very tricky but still possible. In an episode of the show "Mr. Robot", a character used his long-term status as a Wikipedia editor to create a fake page for another character, claiming he was someone he wasn't. Lots of people in the real world edit articles as pranks, but I don't think I've ever seen one myself. So no, Wikipedia is not a website whose word is law, and I think it acts more as a source for people to read over things so they get the gist of the topic and a little more. I just don't like to see it squandered for a few allegations of misinformation when the amount of useful information is much higher. Because of this, I like to treat it as a "Based on a true story" type deal. It's not 100% exact, but it's not way out of the ballpark either (unless someone's messing with it). If we were conscientious about how reliable an article might be, we could probably spot a hoax, too, so Wikipedia (in my view) is a safe website to use if the user is doing so defensively. After all, these forms of media are based on collaborative data, and although flawed, can provide an adequate amount for someone trying to get some interesting statistics on things around the world.