The schools should have used wikipedia as an opportunity to teach media literacy. You don't use wiki as your source, you go to the cited sources and investigate those. Use the cited sources a in your school reports.

That might be one reason why some warned against using it, but I definitely had teachers in middle school and high school that explicitly said not to use it because it could be changed by anyone including people who could be wrong or lying.

Technically you could cite a version in the version history. But Wikipedia isn't about being right. It's about trying to get It better

And the ability for folks to change it and provide inaccurate sources. It's peer reviewed for the most part and academia wants officially peer reviewed sources.

Hmm, interesting. When I was in HS, I would paraphrase Wiki and use their citations in my bibliography 😆

It's also just often completely inaccurate. The standards it uses to cite works make them pretty much useless: any good information on Wikipedia is on there by accident.