Wikipedia Has a Bad Reputation

I've been told to never use Wikipedia as a source more times than I can count. From the amount of times high school teachers talk about it, you'd think that half the papers they see cite Wikipedia and nothing else. I'm not a high school teacher, maybe that's true, but I feel like it's given Wikipedia a pretty bad name in general. Like yeah, the whole point is that anyone can edit a page, but it's not unmoderated. In fact, Wikipedia actually does a lot of work to ensure crowdsourcing goes smoothly. Editors need to make an account and it's pretty easy to get banned for posting misinformation. Particularly controversial pages are usually locked and require special permissions to edit. For example, the page on climate change has a dedicated group of editors who fact check and remove any additions or edits that don't stand up to scrutiny. Editors can be anyone, but anyone includes experts in many different fields and others with deep knowledge of specific subject areas. So why is Wikipedia shunned so harshly?

I think there's an element of fear involved. Pretty mild fear compared to most, but it's still there. People are afraid of being wrong and the fact that Wikipedia has an obvious risk factor makes it more dangerous than other sources. Sure, a newspaper article or printed encyclopedia can also be wrong, but Wikipedia is upfront about its crowdsourced nature and that highlights the possibility of mistakes. This is both good and bad. It allows people to make an informed choice about who to trust, but it also somewhat discounts the hard work Wikipedia editors do and undermines the public trust in crowdsourced information in general. Like Wikipedia itself, this is a double-edged sword.

The public focus on Wikipedia as the poster child of crowdsourcing definitely colors how people see the whole concept. And when the popular narrative surrounding Wikipedia is that it's untrustworthy and easy to mess with for a prank, that reflects on crowdsourcing as a whole. So I have to wonder if presenting Wikipedia in a more nuanced way would make crowdsourcing as more popular option.

An example of strict Wikipedia moderation:

https://mashable.com/feature/climate-change-wikipedia/