A funny thing I have noticed about Wikipedia is that although citing Wikipedia itself in an academic paper is still not a good idea generally speaking, the references provided in a Wikipedia article are usually far more relevant than the ones provided in a typical IEEE paper.

It was a shock for me to discover that the "literature review" of an IEEE paper I was reading was essentially useless compared to the one provided by Wikipedia on the same topic. When combined with the fact that the IEEE paper was behind a paywall and the Wikipedia article was accessed within seconds using a search engine, I now know better how to do a literature review...

Why is this the case? Part of what I have noticed about IEEE is that at least 20% of the references provided are simply added at reviewer's insistence to boost their favorite author's citation count (possibly themselves), regardless of what it has to say about the topic at hand. I don't really know how much of this extends to non-IEEE venues. What I can say is that the mathematics papers I have read provide much better references.