As far as wikipedia goes, and I am thinking mostly of my subject area, one of the pitfalls is the extremely dated nature of many of the tertiary sourced used- or sometimes their inappropriate usage: miscitations, misuses, or misappropriations- generally claiming they say something they do not.

Wikipedia's goal is not to display current or recent scholarship- but then that's not really a goal of any encyclopedia. So it can be hard to actually know what to question if you don't already know the subject and the citations the information seems to rest on.

An example for me would be an attempt at a recent page by an obviously dedicated editor on the [Franco-Tahitian War] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Tahitian_War). While some of the sources the author used are good- they are missing a number of the admittedly small canon of works on this event and they rely almost entirely on English language scholarship. They also use a number of highly political and partisan popular history/travel/literature books not written by Pacific or Tahitian specialists and take their information at face value.

The problem is not necessarily whats wrong with the information in the article- though some of it is a bit off, its that its missing perspective and has an implicit bias towards the narrative of the conflict written as written by the Protestant missionaries, because thats the bias embedded the sources they used- but you wouldn't know any of that without either tracking the information backwards- or already having a good familiarity with the published and unpublished sources on the event.

So that is the gap I think you risk falling into with Wikipedia- the often completely invisible bias of the often dated, occasionally dubious secondary literature that a well meaning and hard working editor may have used. There is no vetting or specialty required, so biased perspective, especially biased language seeps in most often by accident and ignorance.

I teach and I always tell my classes that wiki often forms a good starting point because it gives an outline of what to look for as they research further into the topic. The internal links and the citations at the bottom are helpful because they act as a guide of what to look at. For senior students, the usual 'perspectives' warning is strongly emphasised as the information does age and change. In my field, ancient history, new discoveries, new translations, and new interpretations can completely alter the story. It is handy, but not a complete answer. Sadly, junior students see it as a 'bible' and normally don't go much beyond it.