The content of any given article may recently have been
changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion
does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the
relevant fields.
Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything below university level should definitely use it.
Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.
I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.
I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36.
Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that apparently only appears in Cowell's New Musical Resources. Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous section that mentions the influence of Cowell's book on Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.)
> That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.
As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate starting point for learning about his life and music.
Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about Wikipedia's veracity.