Your course readings are only a piece of achieving an understanding of your topic. Broad overviews, like the ones you might find on Wikipedia, help in the following ways:
Why use these and not Wikipedia?
Don't frame it as either/or. Think of these resources as more comprehensive and expert entries to build off of what you may have learned in Wikipedia. They are places for digging deeper.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.