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.
To say nothing about the famous source [citation needed] and their clear anti communist bias. /s
More seriously, XKCD did a simple but good comics about some issues with certain Wikipedia sources: https://xkcd.com/978/
It’s of course not unique to wikipedia, Adrian Zenz for example once wrote a big report to the German government with in theory lots of “sources” mentionned at the bottom of every page.
the issue of course was that if you actually checked the source, half the time it was various publications that themselves used studies or reports by Adrian Zenz himself as their source, so the guy was actually using himself as a source, but with just a few intermediaries from western media it gave the illusion of a large number of different sources with the same opinion.
And the other half were themselves sourcing from well knonw totally not biased sources like Radio Free Asia, the National Endowment for Democracy, or ASPI.