They should have always been teaching to use Wikipedia as a beginning of research. Go to wiki, follow the cited sources and follow those cited searches if anything was referenced.

There was always a double standard though compared to something like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pre-internet, for practicality, you couldn’t really check the cited sources on Britannica, so you took it as word of god. They’re a major publication! Huge money and people who wear suits and monocles wrote it! Posh British sounding name! How could they be wrong?

Except that when researchers compared Britannica to Wikipedia for inaccuracies, they found Britannica to contain a much higher rate. So why did Britannica keep being held in higher regard? Pure appeal to authority.