It's sad that papers are citing to Wikipedia. Citation 101 is to cite to primary sources if possible, secondary otherwise, at least for substantive claims. Wikipedia isn't a secondary source, or as you point out any kind of legitimate source. Even if Wikipedia were perfectly reliable and accurate, it'd at best be a tertiary source, but it'd still be better to shorten the chain (unlike a tertiary source like a dictionary, which arguably is in a sense a kind of primary or secondary source). And citing to Wikipedia only proves how lazy an author is given Wikipedia itself usually cites to primary and secondary sources, so they couldn't even be bothered to copy+paste the reference, let alone actually read and analyze it first. (Many times I've come across citations that don't support the Wikipedia claim, and sometimes even contradict it, though that's hardly unique to Wikipedia. At least with Wikipedia I can try to do something about it. But even a bad citation is valuable precisely because it can be followed and verified in context.)