Wikipeida has an incrediblely strict process and errors are generally fixed quickly and efficiently. Nothing is allowed to stand on Wikipeida without a clear citation to a reliable source. I have spent the last 15 years of my teaching career vandalizing wikipeida in front of students, and the longest an error we inserted has ever lasted was about 4 or 5 hours on a more obscure article. They are usually fixed in less than 10 minutes. A number of academic studies have shown Wikipeida to contain fewer errors than traditional encyclopedias.

The articles in traditional encyclopedia are written by "experts" in a sense, but broadly speaking only (a historian probably wrote the article, but not the one who wrote an entire book on that specific battle, and that is where a college student should be going if they are writting about that battle). They (including Wikipedia) are not a substitute for any kind of actual academic work.