Whenever someone says that anybody can edit Wikipedia, they miss out on a very simple argument. Yes, anybody can edit Wikipedia, but have you tried editing Wikipedia? Clearly, you haven't tried it, because if you have tried editing Wikipedia, you would have known it is not an easy task.
Wikipedia is a marvelous thing in the internet era. Imagine thousands and thousands of people who are interested in a particular topic, researching about it, and writing a collaborative article.
Like with any other thing, there are bad elements - so in such large groups there will be people with vested interest. But every writing on Wikipedia is weighed by the policies of the Wikipedia. It should be unbiased and factual.
So no matter what you write, there will be 10 other people who will point out that it is not correct, or it is biased, and they will revert it. They will have an argument about it, and there will be discussions, and then there will be consensus. And many a times, the consensus is a bad idea in an internet culture, because it means that you are just average. But when it comes to Wikipedia, the consensus is what makes it beautiful. The result is that we have lakhs and lakhs of articles of Wikipedia, which are thoroughly fact-checked, which are thoroughly referenced and as unbiased as it possibly could be.
Of course, there will be some articles as exceptions here and there, there will be some misses, and there will be some errors too. But if you take on this project, and if you try to do it, then you will not have a successful project at the end of it. It is only possible because it happened on the internet.
Strangers came together for a single vision, and we have Wikipedia. And so anyone who says that Wikipedia should not be trusted, it's a very bad argument. Wikipedia is the first thing you do, because all the basic research which you need to do for an article has already been done in Wikipedia. The incredible volunteers have already searched the news websites and the reference website, and they have collated all the information, referenced it line by line, and as unbiased as possible.
Now you can take your research one step deeper by taking all this information and doing real life interviews back and behind the scenes, something behind a paywall, something like that. You can do your second-hand research, but the first-hand research has already been done by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is one of those examples in the era of the internet, that it is a beautiful gift to everyone. Every project, everything which you need to understand at a very basic level, at the very first level, you can simply search on the internet. The first thing you land on is on Wikipedia, and you will get a gist of everything you need to learn.
And then if you need to go deeper, you can keep going deeper. But for most of the people, Wikipedia satisfies the hunger for the knowledge at the very base level. That is a very beautiful thing.
So in essence, Wikipedia is one of the boons of the internet, and we hardly see a project so large with varied collaboration and impeccable contributions.
So next time if someone comes to you and says, hey, did you reference Wikipedia? It's not something reliable - anybody can edit Wikipedia. Your rebuttal should be as simple as that. Try editing Wikipedia.