Wiki is considered a good 'starting point' for research but because of it's crowd sourcing nature, isn't a reliable source to quote and should never be quoted. However, if the information you're looking for, such as Sisu's 'Groupthink', has footnotes to robust references [and it does] then for our purposes on here, it's about as legitimate as you can get. For uni essays, research etc. then you would quote the references from the footnotes. Wiki does the work for you in terms of things like Groupthink by putting together most of the information you require on the subject using an array of references.
And no a quote or link to wiki wouldn't be accepted on an academic paper but universities are starting to see that a lot of wiki entries are well researched with extensive citations. Some US colleges are working with wiki editors to clean up entries because of students growing reliance on wiki as a first port of call.
And that will be the reason for the fall in educational standards, what has happened to spending hours online reading and researching published papers and looking though books?
Wiki can be used, however if it is using well referenced work why not quote the original and not the wiki link?



