Wikipedia links have led to many interesting HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The best thing about those threads is that the topics usually aren't correlated with other topics that appear here. This is good for curiosity. Generic Wikipedia links on popular topics are low-quality submissions, but those rarely make the front page.

We do prefer a high-quality third party link to Wikipedia submissions when one is available: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

p.s. If by "outage reports" you mean posts like "$FooCo is down", we routinely penalize those. People aren't going to stop posting them though.