I never mentioned anything about citing Wikipedia directly.
Use Wikipedia to get information, reference that information by looking into the relevant indexes at the bottom of the page.
Then I have no idea why you were telling me I was forgetting something when we're both on the same page. That's exactly what I said earlier. :\
That's fair enough since it's not really a source of information in the first place, it's a collection of information from other sources. Original research is discouraged, and it's usually flagged when it happens.
But that doesn't really say anything about Wikipedia's reliability as a whole. It's technically correct to say "it's not a reliable source" because it isn't a source of information at all, but it gives the impression that anything you find there is inherently unreliable. That's not really true and I think that's where everyone is butting up against you.
They're still missing the point, though.
It's still a source of information in the same way any encyclopedia is, in that it's an intermediary for a credited source. I can use the information located in there in every day situations and be able to say "I read it on Wikipedia", because that's technically my source, however the issue has more to do with academics rather than layman usage. Regardless, Wikipedia is set up in a way that is inherently unreliable, this is not debatable it is a fact and is something the foundation has been battling for a while. You can even see this sometimes in notices they put up warning against unsourced material.
For as long as it is editable by anyone there is a fundamental issue with reliability. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a problem, and it's why I find it reasonable for schools to ban the use of Wikipedia as a source, because at it's basic level it is not reliable and anyone determined enough can "change" the truth. This doesn't mean it is always unreliable in every situation, that is why I raise the point about actual articles having sources. If it's sourced and the source checks out, then you can safely rely on it, but the source at that point is no longer Wikipedia, it's whatever the source was listed as.
Now, to illustrate using a real example, the article on Computers has an entire section on
Stored-Program Architecture that is unsourced, and there is a notice warning about it. Note that this notice is from July and is still up more than half a year later. If during that half-year I were to do a research paper on stored-program architecture and used that segment as a "source" (because at this point there is no source on Wikipedia, it's just something someone has written objectively and has thus become it's own source of information), I could potentially be using incorrect information and end up failing because the person who wrote that section was as equally uninformed as myself and pulled it out of his ass based off of a loose understanding of the subject. No one challenges it because either no one sees it or those who do also don't know enough to change it or don't have any sources of their own. Because the person who wrote the blurb has not provided sources, there's no way to tell if what it says is true on it's own, at which point you'd be better off
doing the research properly. I could wake up tomorrow and this entire section could be full of completely different information with links to real sources and the fault would be my own because I used an unreliable source of information.
