Your teachers weren’t gaslighting you, stop using that word when you mean lying.
Wikipedia may have sited sources but those sources can, and have been, incorrect many times. Misleading information is still prevalent on the site. So even if you steal the sources Wikipedia uses in their articles you better dig deeper because that shit is nefarious. Wikipedia is not immune to western propaganda. They pick and choose what info to put out there from the sources knowing most, like OP, won’t read deeper into anything they site. You’ll just take their word for it.
Wikipedia is good for everything except politics
And geography sometimes
And as most things ARE politics…
there’s a political element to everything, but some things are less explicitly political. wikipedia’s article on, say, meerkats is probably on average much better than its article on stalin for example.