"My wife is a middle school librarian. She wages a constant battle to get students to not take Wikipedia at face value and to check another source..."

             This is probably the biggest problem of all. Kids have a tendancy to take anything they see in print as truth.

               I have used it for research, and printed things out, and then have gone back to the same entry and found the things I'd printed earlier to be missing.

               Most of the stuff I was looking into shouldn't have been contraversial at all. I couldn't think of who might have been motivated to change the entries.