Is wikipedia reliable?

Yes, pretty much. I use it just about every day. It"s very useful to me, especially because of the depth of coverage of even the most arcane technology topics. The content usually contains links to other, highly relevant, sources.There is always room for improvement and the volunteers who monitor content changes do an absolutely sterling job.

If you're curious about stuff in general, it would be great it up on wikipedia. However, most professors do not even accept wikipedia because anyone can edit it and make up information. I believe there is a video online called professor wikipedia by collegehumor. You'll learn a lot about how "reliable' wikipedia is.

Well it is as close as it can gets on an online encyclopedia, it has the danger of misinformation rarely but it might be true since it can be edited by anyone but most of the times the mistakes are fixed.

It gives you a good idea of things, but in some things it is not reliable. The Wikipedia article on the history of Uganda, for instance is 100% biased, to the point of being misleading, in favour of the former brutal president Milton Obote, and Nyerere of Tanzania, who manipulated him into power (I haven't had the time to edit it myself - I hope some people more in the know will do so). Some novel and film synopses are wrong in their detail (I watch very few films, so I remember what I did watch a lot better - I haven't had the time to correct them, let alone watch the said films or read the said novels again to check my memory, which would be involved). However, on academic matters it is not bad, though the article on Biomedical Scientists, for instance, could do with reworking.

Wikipedia is not a 100% reliable, because the main editors and moderators can't check all the pages every minute to delete every kind of bullsh.t and nonsense people write their, sometimes for fun... but mostly, it is okay, especially in general knowledge fields.

Not really. You will need to check those info that you get from wikipedia in a different website in order to verify them. Last time I copied some chemical properties on the wikipedia about certain compounds and they ended up being the wrong info. I think it would be better if you can go and find some specialized websites for every field of your subjects in order to get the most correct info.

It is true, anyone can edit it. It depends what you are looking up, and what 'flags' it notes at the top of the page. For instance, some articles will show a bar flag that says 'this information needs to be cleaned up' meaning that it needs to be written better. Another is that there are 'no sources to back up' which means that someone wrote whatever and they can't proove it one way or the other. I think it is fine for general information if you are just trying to get a general idea of something, but not a site to be cited in papers.