Wikipedia is a fatalistic resource and I use it a lot myself, especially for concepts that are new to me (which happens pretty much every day, so as I said, I use it a lot). It's, um, 'reliable' (reliable in scare quotes) in the sense that it probably won't lead you astray, and is a good source of references for deeper reading, but it is quite slanted toward a particular perspective of what's important and what sources can be used; it could really use more diversity of authors and (especially) editors. It's also not error-free, in the sense that it often conflates two distinct concepts under one heading (they should remove entirely the 'forwarding' function). But even with these shortcomings, I would say it's not less biased or error prone than other sources at a similar level, and nothing comes close to it for range of coverage. I would tell my students "start with Wikipedia, but don't stop there."
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