hillbilly, I agree that wikipedia should not be used in papers. When I was in middle school, teachers forbade use of any encyclopedia as a cited reference.
Wikipedia does have transient vandalism problems, and the grammar is not always up to par. But if you are critical enough to catch the occasional bit of vandalism, it is far and away the best resource in existence for getting background knowledge on most subjects.
Long-term vandalism of important articles is extremely rare. Low-traffic pages are where lies and disinformation lurk. There are several low-traffic pages that I check every few weeks for vandalism.
Nobody should ever use one source for all information on a subject. Wikipedia may be vandalized, but other encyclopedic resources have unintentional errors that are just as bad.
Wikipedia has an advantage in that respect. When reading a suspect article, a wise course of action is to read the current edition, and read an edition from a few months back. Any major disparities or additions should be treated with caution.
Rather than complain complain complain, perhaps it's more productive to recognize the wiki as a great source of information (even if it shouldn't be quoted/cited in academia), and pick a few articles that you're willing to audit every once in a while.
I think Wikipedia is foolish to allow anonymous edits, because that's where virtually all of the vandalism -- obvious and subtle -- comes from. The rationale that oppressed people need to be able to contribute without fear of reprisal from their employer or government is silly. Wikipedia has already banned edits -- both anonymous AND pseudonymous -- from Tor exit nodes. If they were serious about creating an environment where oppressed individuals could contribute information safely, they would at least allow registered users to contribute while using Tor.
IPs of anonymous edits are logged and are visible to everyone. Pseudonyms offer more protection against typical attempts to discern posters' identities. Pseudonyms are only harmful in the case where a posters' contributions offend an entity willing to expend significant resources collecting all that poster's contributions, doing textual analysis, and comparing that writing to existing writing samples of employees/known-subversives/etc. That is a threat model most of us don't have to worry about, and anonymous edits don't fully protect against it either. Anonymous edits from fixed IPs or netblocks can be separated by textual analysis into probable individual posters. Same with anonymous edits from Tor exit nodes (which are now banned from anonymous posting). If someone is clever enough to effectively disguise his writing style, using a pseudonym for subversive wiki edits is not harmful. It doesn't matter that the pseudonym's posts are all tied together. What matters is that they cannot be easily associated with flesh&blood person.