It’s not as much of an issue in science (Natural World) but because it tends to pop up to the top of the search engines, my students tend to overuse Wikipedia, so I’m considering, at least as an experiment, blocking it. Wikipedia tends to be reliable in general, but its open nature, where anyone can edit also means that it can also be spectacularly wrong.
I use, and I encourage my students to use Wikipedia for two things, finding images that are not restrictively copyrighted (almost all images on Wikipedia are free for anyone to use since that is a specific part of their policy), and finding, at the bottom of the articles, the list of references to what are usually credible sources for the topic they are researching. While this seems to work well for science research, because Wikipedia’s articles tend to be too technical for middle schoolers, some of my students have been burned when using Wikipedia articles as a reference for their social world projects.
So I’m going to try blocking Wikipedia for a week and see what happens. Students can still use Wikimedia Commons for images, but they’ll have to find sources in other ways.