It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

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kaliqt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Laziness should never be the issue.

The issue is that Wikipedia can be wrong and you’d only know that by going to the source (or lack thereof), or checking other sources.

	▲	pqtyw 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		All secondary sources can be just as wrong, while standards of course might differ being published doesn't prove much on its own. Also of course in many/most non theoretical fields you find plenty of conflicting sources so relying on a "consensus" based high quality encyclopaedia article seems like a more reliable approach if you are new to the field and don't really understand what you are reading.