I promise you, I am not missing any other point you have made. my intent with selectively quoting was to go ahead and knock the legs out from under all the other stuff that rests upon those two statements in order to save us the back and forth of big walls of text.

My skepticism absolutely does not imply that nothing is trustworthy when it has to be verified. It explicitly applies to a website (Wikipedia) which maintains an extensive record of ways in which it has been shown to be systematically untrustworthy.

Within the scope of this discussion, it’s not important what sources of information I would consider trustworthy, we’re only talking about Wikipedia, a source that has a long history of being untrustworthy. We are talking about Wikipedia because it is the subject of the ops post which compares it to the library of Alexandria.