Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
I don't know about your professors in your undergrad courses, but I would venture a guess that most academics would prefer their students to use academic sources to back up their proto-academic papers. Some of their reasoning may well be found in traditionalism, technophobia, or personal preference, but underneath those layers of bad reasoning, I would say that there is a kernel of a reasonable argument to be fielded against using Wikipedia as a source at university.
Much has been made of the peer review process, but if we're being honest, for a lot of academic papers and articles, that review process is so riddled of holes that we might as well not bother. However, academic papers have one major advantage over even the most specialized Wikipedia article, and that advantage is accountability.
First of all, every academic paper has definite authors who are known in the academic world, and the papers these authors tend to cite also have authors that are known in academia, and so on; in short, every academic author can be looked up and their oeuvre checked for certain longstanding issues and patterns that may shed light on potential problems, political slants, or issues.
For example, the infamous Lancet article that was responsible for the "vaccines cause autism" hysteria had an author with a well known conflict of interest due to his own vaccine business, and the authors he cited as references were mostly anti-establishment kooks and cranks with an easily-trackable history in pseudoscience and quackery. Anybody who read that article and knew a thing about academic papers could find these issues and talk about them. In a Wiki article, most of these glaring red flags would have been hidden by a shroud of pseudonymity and the unaccountable power of staff editors.
Second of all, this accountability also makes it a lot easier to spot political bias in academic articles - if an author is a well known Marxist, for example, even a layperson would expect their article to be slanted towards that point of view and prepare accordingly. A Wikipedia article, meanwhile, has no visible author, and whatever slant they have is therefore a lot more hidden and harder to discern for somebody who isn't already a specialist in the field. This is especially problematic in more obscure areas of the site, where editors knowledgeable in that field of knowledge tend to be hard to find and singular biases reign supreme. This is especially noticeable in politically contentious fields such as history, philosophy or economics, where more obscure topics are frequently in the deathgrip of a small number of power users who effectively are given a free hand to push their bias wherever they can.
Third of all, as nascent academics, I would say it absolutely behooves a university to make its students familiar with academic literature, and to get them into the habit of using it properly to support their work.
