I seem to be getting a lot more detailed information from Wiki pages on various comic characters than I’ve seen anywhere else, including guides by the publisher. Is Wiki the place to go for this info now?
IIRC recently science articles in Wikipedia were found by a major publication to be as reliable or better than the revered Encyclopedia Britannica!
But, for other subjects you still have to consider Wikipedia as only an starting point for more research, in other words, check their cites and if needed contribute or edit the article so it becomes more accurate.
Bear in mind that on Wikipedia information is only there if someone felt it important enough to write up. Given the notorious fanaticism of comics fans it’s hardly surprising they’d take advantage of a space to display their knowledge to a wide audience.
I find it’s pretty accurate, and if it isn’t, then hey, I make it accurate.
That major publication later admitted to tweaking the results a whole lot.
They didn’t admit it, I see now- Britannica chewed them out (warning: PDF file).
Well, it is a little bit of one organization that should not be used as the last word on research chewing on another that has a similar issue:
But, yeah, until I see a reply from Nature I will go now to say that one should use both Wikipedia and Britannica only as starting points for more research.
Of course for the matter at hand, I have to say Britannica is the pits. 
Wikipedia is great if you need an overview of something, and as a springboard for more in-depth research.
Say, for example, I was writing an historic piece on the Battle of Noxious Air Springs in 1871 (if such a battle existed, that is…)
I could go to the library and get out a Scholarly Tome by Professor Minutae DeTayle, which could invariably spend 30 pages just describing what sort of tobacco the soldiers smoked that morning and how many buffalo the Indians killed the evening before as part of the wedding feast for Chief Sows Wild Oats and Chieftaness Doesashestold, with the remaining 270-odd pages devoted to Official Reports, black & white photographs of men with porkchop sideburns and Confederate Army Surplus uniforms, complicated diagrams of the battlefield (which today is the carpark of a WalMart in Bumsecks, Ohio), and contradictory accounts of the battle- all of which would take me days to wade through.
Or, I can log onto Wikipedia and get a brief overview (“White Man: 3,671, Indians: 0”), and some links to further reading (including the website of the Noxious Air Springs Re-Enactment Society, which hasn’t been updated since July 1997), which would point me in the right direction, and best of all, means I don’t have to go to the library, which is unfortunately rather lacking in quality research materials- at least, when it comes to Military History.
Wiki is a good place to look, but it is not a definitive source for anything. Never ever rely on a single source. The best information can be repliated by multiple sources.
Wiki is a good place to shake things out, but always follow-up the references, and try to find alternative references.
Britannica v Nature and Wiki aside, the answer is yes.
Wikipedia is a wonderful source of information about comic characters and other facets of pop culture. Comics aren’t freely accessible to the general public (one cannot find Spider-Man’s infamous Clone Saga in the library), and generally aren’t described in professionally reviewed and edited academic works. I don’t have a subscription to Britannica, but do they have an entry describing the Clone Saga? I somewhat doubt it, I can’t even find an entry for Spider-Man, let alone poor Ben Reilly. But Behold Wikipedia comes through.
Comics are ideal for wiki treatment. Beneath the notice of professionals. Benefits from frequent, almost constant updating. And, to be frank, it doesn’t really matter if it’s wrong, the subject’s so trivial. The next best thing to wiki (besides seeking out the comics in question themselves, often a difficult and expensive task) is asking a bunch of geeks on a forum like this, which is ultimately just as error-prone as wikipedia but has the additional disadvantage of being slower.
And now to undermine my own points…
On further reflection. It depends on what you need.
If you want an overview of a character’s history, like say if you read Birds of Prey and want to know who this new girl Gypsy is, then Wiki’s a good bet. Don Markstein’s Toonopedia is a decent alternative, although not so comprehensive or frequently updated, but it has good notes about the character’s publication history, which wiki sometimes neglects.
If you want a recap of a storyline that you can’t find or aren’t interested in reading yourself, Wiki’s the place to turn again.
If you want scholarly treatment of the artistic theory behind comics, then there are books by people like Scott McCloud and the late Will Eisner which may serve better. I’m sure the same applies to the history of comics, although I can’t recommend anything off the top of my head. Wikipedia probably gives a better brief overview on these topics than most conventional encyclopedias.
In my experience, WP’s comic coverage is better for more recent stuff and quite shallow for golden and silver age things. (The later is my interest.)
Well, I’ve done my part, adding that section about Mxyztplk’s 30th-century descendant. What more do you want?
What Nature did goes beyond “tweaking the results.”
That’s falsifying research, pure and simple. Shame on them.