How reliable is Wikipedia?

8/10. They come with citations that you can always click. I deducted 1 point because not all citations will be reliable, and another point deduction for dead links.

It's good for getting a general summary of a topic, but the user-edited nature of the site makes it unacceptable for formal research.

Even so, it's a pretty good resource to scout for legitimately cited resources - although those need their own individual verification.

Depends on the topic.

Discographies are great, they get a 9 or 10 from me. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd_discography

7. Some articles are better than others.

5

For anything political or otherwise controversial? Very poor. But for things that aren't contentious they're usually ok.

As reliable as the mainstream narrative is on every subject. It's Wikipedia's actual policy that they don't care about the truth; they only want "verifiability," which means that some mainstream source has to agree with what they are saying. This leads to situations where, for example, the actual person that a Wikipedia article is about can't correct information about himself/herself, and their "no original research" policy means you can't correct some bit of information that can easily be proven wrong by posting, say, a screenshot from a movie, or your own pictures of something you own that proves some of their information wrong, because that's "original research."

Then there's the bias of the "higher-ups" there, which results in absurdities like the article about corn being called "maize," even though hardly anyone calls it maize in everyday language.

I'd give it a 6 out of 10. It's not hard to edit various topics and there have wikipedia edit wars between two people with differing views on a topic. Some political topics are locked to prevent crazy edits.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32412121