A hope that's admittedly probably wildly optimistic is that Wikipedia could help people get better at critically evaluating sources, since everyone knows you are not "supposed" to take it completely uncritically on the basis of the publisher's authority. If you get some familiarity with it gets reasonably easy to spot which articles have something strange about them. Sometimes it's the writing style, sometimes the tone that clearly sounds like advocacy or PR copy rather than encyclopedia copy, sometimes the absence of or particular choice of references, etc. I tend to also start with strong prior skepticism depending on the area, e.g. articles on present-day companies, but not ones big enough to attract a lot of real editors (unlike Google, Microsoft, etc., which do) are inherently suspect for paid editing, while articles on mathematics, whatever other problems they might have, typically don't ring my "might be a PR shill" warning bell.

Can be useful even outside of Wikipedia! Distinguishing between trade-nonfiction books honestly trying to cover a subject, versus trade-nonfiction books that are thinly veiled ads for a piece of technology (or the author's management/diet/etc. consulting gig), has some similarities.