No one should head to Wikipedia, or Britannica, for state of the art facts. In order to understand current views on a subject, you pretty much have to look at academic sources. Anything else is either going to take a more conservative approach, or there is a high probability that you're reading weakly supported arguments. Of course, that is assuming that you're using intellectually honest sources. There are more than enough fringe theories out there that are selective in their choice of evidence or use evidence that is verifiably wrong.

Outside of astronomy, I like researching First Nations history. It is fascinating how much contemporary thought diverges from textbook presentations. There is a good reason for that. Traditional presentations rely heavily upon western records, because historians have traditionally relied upon texts that they considered authoritative. Those texts were, of course, heavily biased because of the social and political views of the day. Contemporary thought diverges because it examines other evidence. Sometimes it is less authoritative texts. Sometimes it is archaeological finds. Even the nature of archaeological finds is rapidly changing as better tools become available. All of this presents a much more interesting picture of what the Americas looked like in the past. In the long run, much of this will likely be adopted as fact.

Yet I won't go to the Wikipedia for that sort of knowledge. I won't go to Britannica either. Simply put, we haven't taken enough time to consider the implications of the new techniques that have uncovered new evidence nor have we taken enough time to examine the implications of the evidence itself. That takes time and discourse that are within the realm of the academic. It takes one researcher proposing an idea and another to say that they are wrong, then critically examining what they do and do not know to prove that one side or the other is correct. Or maybe it takes one researcher to propose an idea and another to support them with more evidence. While I'm a bit more skeptical of that approach, because it is easy to be selective about evidence unless someone challenges you critically, it at least forces us to progressively develop ideas.

It is easy to say that facts are facts, yet facts are never that easy to come by. I like the example of Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the Earth over 2000 years ago. He did. The results were quite accurate. What people often fail to acknowledge is that Eratosthenes' measurements were based upon some very important assumptions, such as the sun being far enough away for the incident rays to be parallel. While we now know that those assumptions are sound, that wasn't always the case. For all his contemporaries knew, Eratosthenes' data may have proven that the sun was 6200 km away. A similar idea hold for Copernicus. We now accepts the gist of his ideas. Yet, from the perspective of his contemporaries, he presented a model that was less accurate than Ptolemy's. It took Kepler to fix the inaccuracies and Newton to say why Kepler's model worked. In the cases of Eratosthenes and Copernicus, acceptance took a long time coming but it was because the solid evidence took a long time to develop.

Now those are just examples that proved to be correct in the long run. How many examples were there of incorrect theories, theories that were on similar foundations at the time but that the evidence eventually contradicted? Do we want that sort of thing to creep into encyclopedias? Even if you point to the prior ideas being wrong, is it better to have a stable set of knowledge that is overturned with time or is it better to have an unstable set of knowledge that accepts that it may eventually be replaced. Clearly I'm arguing in favour of the former. Perhaps you prefer the latter. (Even though I do prefer the former, I accept the latter is necessary in academic circles. The difference being that academics follow some rules when it comes to the questioning and development of knowledge, while fringe theories seem to be the norm in society at large because they don't accept those rules.)