They're right.
That's why it's only level one.
Wikipedia, although it is a great resource for certain things, cannot be trusted to the point where you should use it as your exclusive source for information. The nature of a wiki means that it can be edited by almost anyone, and therefore the reliability of the information is low. You'll find, if you read and use Wikipedia often, that certain types of articles are more reliable than others.
Articles on a place, like the main Kyoto, Japan article, or articles on a historical event, like the main American Civil War article, tend to be based on facts that cannot be disputed, and therefore are usually relatively reliable. Articles on a person, especially one who is still living, and even more especially one who is politically or religiously active, tend to be incredibly unreliable. For example, the Jeremiah Wright Controversy article, being both political and religious, is one of the most highly edited pages on Wikipedia.
All that being said, Wikipedia does have its uses, even when it comes to research for writing fiction. My favorite use of Wikipedia is as a way to check my memory. I'm the type of guy whose head is filled with useless facts that I have no idea why I remember. Some of them are accurate, others are not. I often use Wikipedia as a very basic reference to check whether I remember something correctly.
Another great use is to discover some of the articles and websites that we will cover tomorrow, in Research for Writers Level Two. Wikipedia has two sections at the bottom of almost every article that will lead you to better, more detailed information. References will lead you to books, using their title and ISBN, that were either referenced in the writing of the article, or are heavily related to the topic covered. External links will take you to websites that are outside of Wikipedia, and are related to the topic in the article. The quality of these external websites and the information they provide can vary widely.
So that's it for today. Be sure to come back all week for the series on research for writers. We're not done with tropes yet either, I just have to do some more, well ... research.
