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.
Very early in my transition from a SocDem with communist aesthetics to an ML I decided to check the wiki page of the 50-cent army. I had heard it somewhere in some context and remembered the name for no reason.
I don’t know what prompted me to look into the sources but I did. One of the sources, maybe the fourth one, is a study on online arguments regarding topics that one would expect paid agents of the seeseepee to join in if they exist. Their result was that there were no indications such an organised effort existed. They mentioned this wasn’t proof such an organisation didn’t exist, bless them.
Now, after hearing this one might reasonably believe this citation is there to say some argue this organisation doesn’t exist, or at least that it’s not certain. Nope. The citation is used to say that another name for these supposedly existing agents is wumao. That’s it. As I recall at no point does the article suggest that the organisation may not exist or mention a study where they couldn’t find the traces they would be leaving. If I had to guess I’d say someone did write these things, and use this study to cite that and the name, then had their contributions removed by some removed like mikehawk10(currently Red-tailed hawk) who seems to be a literal CIA agent. Fancy that. Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia