Librarian here! I’ve worked at both academic (college/university) and public libraries, and let me tell you this: most print encyclopedias are useless garbage we can’t get rid of fast enough. With the exception of subject-specific sets which we need to buy again every few years because the information has become outdated, most of the information in any volume of an encyclopedia is far more accessible and far more in-depth on the internet.
Wikipedia as a reference resource is fantastic because, just like print encyclopedias, it serves as a jumping-off point for research… and so do librarians! A librarian isn’t going to just write your paper for you, we’re going to point you to the books, articles, and websites that contain the information. Wikipedia is great for that, too, because any article that gets more than a bit of traffic will wind up with sources and external links. But print encyclopedias don’t go that far in citing their sources, and because they’re static media, the references may not only be outdated, they might be entirely inaccessible due to age, obscurity, or cost of access.
And there’s an interesting thing about all those books we have on the shelves… anyone can write one, and usually they only have a handful of other people checking their work. Academic journals are somewhat notorious for the ease with which a completely falsified paper can see publication (especially in cases of electronic journals), but printed books can also be easily falsified, whether as a result of publishers with an agenda or just fact-checkers slacking off.
As has been pointed out above, wikipedia is really great at getting obscenely specific in terms of the topics of articles. It’s an amazing collection of data, and more importantly, it’s an amazing collection of sources of data.
The role of a reference librarian and a wikipedia editor are basically the same: show you a brief summary of the information you need, and point you to more in-depth, reliable sources.
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