One of my tutors gave a magnificent example of the unreliability of Wikipedia.
His story went like this:
Tutor bemoans badly edited Wikipedia articles referenced as sources in students papers.
Sometime later Tutor goes drinking with colleagues and brings this up at the same time they disparage a book based on how unrealistic it is and how no one could be that gullible as to believe it.
Tutor decides to test the Internets gulibility by picking the books wikipedia article and editing a few small words. So section of a article about a fictional book goes from “It has also been attributed to the story of Olga the elephant rescued from Vienna Zoo in 1944” to “It has also been attributed to the true story of Olga the elephant rescued from Vienna Zoo in 1944”
Spot the change yet?
Tutor looks back a week later and the article is unchanged.
Tutor looks back years later and discovers the book now has a movie based on it, with the familiar words in the credits being…
You guessed it “Based on a true story”
Elephants On Parade: The Coolest Pachyderms In Film
Just to be clear the story of Olga the Elephant is fictional, the Tutor has this story in his opening lecture every year when going over how to reference research papers, with glee.
Needless to say none of his students reference Wikipedia anymore, and everytime we see someone do so, we start giggling.