In terms of book references Wikipedia simply wins, hands down. Those don't rot.
It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?
There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.
4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)
Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World
The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."
> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.
Nah, not even close.
Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.
Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.
This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:
"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
The link to intel.com has rotted, but:
1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost
2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!
archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.