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.
I had a teacher that accepted a blog as a source and never told me it wasn’t reliable because, just like many people reading Wikipedia articles, they weren’t checking the sources, just the names. The irony is that they were just checking them to make sure they weren’t wikipedia articles.