A lot of people tell students they shouldn't use Wikipedia when researching stuff for school.
I think they're missing out on a golden opportunity to teach critical thinking.
Wikipedia is hugely helpful. Even in my professional life, I find it's quite frequently the best resource for quickly and easily getting a general overview of a topic. However, it is of varying quality and is sometimes edited by people who have agendas.
Students should be taught how to how to identify good information vs. questionable information vs. propoganda in Wikipedia. They could, for example, take an article on a topic that interests them and analyze its quality. Go to the sources to see if they check out, do linguistic analysis for biais and spin, look at the discussion page and history and see if there are any edit wars going on and describe how that affects the current state of the article.
It's a live, real, and immediately applicable tool for not only teaching critical thinking, but showing students its importance.
Then, once they've learned all that, they shouldn't be discouraged from using it for research; they should be expected to understand that it isn't the alpha and the omega, and marked accordingly.
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