Wikepedia and Democracy

I always found the discussion of Wikipedia very interesting. There are many different opinions regarding the reliability of the site because as long as there are a lot of people that agree with a certain topic, it is considered truth on Wikipedia. In Comedy Central's short video, Colbert talked about how Wikipedia is largely determined by the idea of democracy. Although Colbert is often sarcastic, he makes an interesting point when he talked about democracy controlling Wikipedia. He used the example of how he personally convinced Americans to believe the African elephant population was increasing because he "had heard that somewhere". Now, there is an actual post on the site that says that very same thing. Colbert's point is that as long as there are many people believing something that could in fact be false, it can still be published as truth on Wikipedia. The site is understood to be reliable and factual by some, in fact, I have many professors at UNI that use it on a regular basis. The other side of the story is some of my professors have forbidden it because it is a load of bull crap. How can we determine if Wikipedia is reliable as a whole? In my opinion, we can't. Honestly, I believe Wikipedia is a good source for information even though there could be some erroneous information posted on it. The truth of the matter is that it will not sway me to stop using the site.