Bluesky

Because directly citing Wikipedia isn't how you're supposed to use it in that sort of setting. What Wikipedia is best-suited for in actual research is being a first stop:

• Get some basic understanding of the subject via the lead section.
• Potentially get some idea on if this subject has plenty of information about it before choosing to write about it (e.g. if you're writing a high school or undergraduate essay, you probably want a topic that has a wealth of information about it, not to spend weeks trawling through archives trying to find whatever scraps you can).
• Edit: Because we try to make technical articles highly accessible, the way an article is written can also give you some idea if a subject is way out of your depth by seeing if you can even follow along with what it's saying. This is important because a) it makes writing easier and b) there's less risk of close paraphrasing when you understand a subject enough to put things into your own words.
• Find what's hopefully a wealth of decent sources that will introduce you properly to the subject.
• Give you leads for what to search for elsewhere by giving you some key pieces of information about the subject.

I would even say that professionally written encyclopedias like Britannica aren't really a good "end source" that you should be citing. You absolutely can use Wikipedia for homework, but you still need to have some basic understanding of how to evaluate the sources that Wikipedia uses. Essentially, we ideally give you a head-start, not a finish line.

You shouldn't use any encyclopedia, wiki or otherwise. They're too surface level for the information you would want to include in any kind of report.

It's great to use for finding a bunch of sources you can cite, however.

Yes you can. You need to cite the sources that the Wikipedia article cites, not just cite wikipedia.

Everyone is responding to you why you shouldn't be using Wikipedia anyways for homework, and I wholeheartedly agree that it's a great starting point but not a great finishing point, but I'll give you a hint as to how you can use it for your homework 😉.

Find your topic in Wikipedia and find a tidbit of information that you want to use on your paper or whatever. Wikipedia should have sources, so find the source of the thing you want to use.

That source now has the information you want to use and much more! That should be citable for your homework!

I mean, would it make sense to cite an encyclopedia?

...those were like these big collections of books that had a bunch of random, useful information in it. Idk if those even included sources