You shouldn’t cite wikipedia in a paper because it’s a tertiary source. Somehow that got lost in translation sometime in the 90s.

You shouldn’t cite any other encyclopedia either, because they’re “some guy” writing a paragraph or so about a thing. I think it was Britannica that Tolkein wrote a lot of the “W”'s for. I’m sure he did a great job, but it’s not exactly easy to fact check him either.