How reliable and accurate is Wikipedia for research?

i would say 80%

It's fine to start a research project, but that's all. A paper that uses Wikipedia itself as a reference would be considered suspect at best but probably just chucked in the trash. I don't think any general encyclopedia article would be considered as suitable source material for any serious research, exept maybe to provide a reference for "common knowledge" but that doesn't have to be cited at all.

It's totally unreliable and inaccurate. Don't even use it. It's that bad. Would you build your house on a swamp? Maybe there's some solid ground, but why risk having your entire house sink? Likewise with Wikipedia. If you take your research seriously at all, you will start out with a better website, heck, you will make the effort to go to an actual library and look at original documents yourself.

As it is an open source site, anyone can add information to it. This makes it unreliable, but it can be a good basis to start research. The information is more reliable if the contributor provides further reference links.

use something different, wikipedia is always constantly being edited by total strangers.

It can be but as people can edit it. I would always recommend a second source to double check the data