[FranzFerdiNaN]

> I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.

Yeah, but basically nobody is capable of evaluating those sources themselves, outside of very narrow topics.

Reading a wikipedia page about Cicero? Better make sure you can read Latin and Greek, and also have a PhD in Roman history and preferably another one in Classical philosophy, or else you will always be stuck with translations and interpretations of other people. And no, reading a Loeb translation from the 1930's doesnt mean you will fully understand what he wrote, because so much of it all hinges on specific words and what those words meant in the context they were written, and how you should interpret whole passages and how those passages relate to other authors and things that happened when he was alive and all that fun stuff.

And that's just one small subject in one discipline. Now move on to an article about Florence during the Renaissance and oh hey suddenly there are yet another couple of languages you should learn and another PhD to get.