Reliability and credibility have absolutely nothing to do with the selection of article topics. R&C are a function of quality and quantity of references and citations used within the individual articles. Quality of coverage gets us respect, but breadth of coverage gets us admiration for our unique ability in the world of encyclopedias to cover more than anyone else. Any educator who finds a properly sourced and cited article in Wikipedia will respect it, however, educators who find the best written prose in the world in articles that lack cited references won't respect that article.
Wikipedia will never be the monolithic "respected source" that some seem to want it to be as long as it remains a wiki. Individual articles will be respected sources, and bring respect to the project, and if we fork upward with a selection of our best cited and sourced articles, we'll have a monolithic "respected source" within the project, but the wiki-ness of the main prevents it from ever serving this role. There are just too many rough edges in a wiki
I can write you a reliable and credible article on virtually any topic, but many of those topics will be excluded from Wikipedia because a consensus considers them to be "unencyclopedic" and I simply accept that as part of the project.
-- Michael Turley User:Unfocused
True, that's exactly why I hate articles being deleted based on them being fancruft. Fancruft isn't a bad thing as long as an interesting info-filled article can be written about it.
--Mgm