Trying to understand the universe using Wikipedia is not as hard as trying to understand black holes.
Wikipedia is notorious for being inaccurate, wrong, or biased. After all, anyone can add stuff to Wikipedia (I've done it - HA!). In articles that were off the beaten track, errors don't get flagged as quickly (or ever). More mainstream articles get some discussion quickly and fixes do happen.
But the universe is weird, so string theory with (n+1) spatial dimensions has to have some holes in it - don't you think? How inaccurate is Wikipedia? Hard to say, but recent reports run from 30% less accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica on 50 science articles compared side-by-side (The Register, 16 Dec 05, Andrew Orlowski). However, Wikipedia articles tend to be longer and more detailed, giving it an overall lower error rate per word.
Comparing encyclopedias, Wikipedia has on the order of 2,100,000,000 words, compared to 25,000,000 in the Britannica, roughly 84 times larger, or an average error rate per word that is 60% less than Britannica.
Britannica prides itself on the quality of it's contributors, but the science articles tend to be written and reviewed by a relatively few number of people. Wikipedia prides itself on the quantity of contributors (a little over 700,000 regular contributors posted in March of 2011), and a quality through revision process. I do like the Borg, collective mindset quality to the articles.
If you are given your news from Fox (or MSNBC), you will get a full, fair, and balanced view of the world, but with a built-in perspective. If you choose to understand the news, you will try to view events from different perspectives. So, if I wanted to understand Loop Quantum Gravity, or the 9th dimension of M-Theory, or how to find work on a brane-world, I would become a physicist. Since I just want to confirm my own perspective, Wikipedia works great!
