Here are several examples of why looking at the Wikipedia article can lead sleuthers in the wrong direction.
At about 4 pm, Maura e-mailed one of her work supervisors and some of her teachers to inform them that there had been a death in her family and that she would be out of town for several days, despite there being no such case of death. Maura packed all her belongings into boxes and removed the art from her room walls.[8]
This passage from Wikipedia presents the "packing" as not only a FACT, but as part of a sequence of activities that started with phone calls regarding lodging (prior to 4 pm), moved to emailing her supervisors and teachers, and then on to packing, as if she finished the emails and then packed. There is absolutely no evidence of when she packed her belongings, whether she had packed in December, thinking of leaving for good, perhaps, and then, still ambivalent, failed to unpack, and so on. Scarinza and others have taken the "packing" as indication of her intent to disappear or commit suicide, but the emails and phone calls may point in another direction, possibly a decision to step out of her academic program for a few days and get the courage up to leave it. (For me, that explains the urge to see her dad in the middle of the night, the trip out of town, etc. It is easier for a "good student" to not go to class if he or she isn't on campus; otherwise, there are all of those "where were you questions" to face. But like everyone else, I am just guessing.) But it is easy to see how misleading this passage from Wikipedia is if someone hasn't read and re-read the newspaper archives on this case, looked at archived documents, seen photos of the cars and the accident seen in NH, etc.
Note that the Wikipedia article references the newspaper article (see the "8" note number) but manages to use the material in a misleading way. This may simply be a result of the fact that W does not have "editors" that read and question writers about what makes it into the text and how the information is presented.
Here are a few other issues:
1. The article doesn't mention that one eyewitness to the car at the scene of the second accident thought she saw a MAN smoking a cigarette. This could be of course just another case where an "eyewitness" is wrong, but the omission from the article smooths over other possibilities that have not been demonstrated to be false.
2. The article references one "possible sighting" that has been debunked.
3. The article does not discuss problems with the investigation, most notably how LE NEVER contacted the woman who owned the condo that Maura called about. It was much later that the mother of Maura's boyfriend contacted her, after so much time had passed that she did not recall speaking to Maura. This is a giant botched opportunity and indication that LE in NH had made up its mind that Maura was a runaway/suicide. (Although even a runaway can be abducted and murdered.)
As I tell my students, Wikipedia can be useful because of the links it provides. Go to the sources. Good journalists either look at conflicting points of view and make some effort to capture where people disagree about facts and their interpretation. And over time, with new material and investigation, the state of a case changes, and so it is important to read the whole archive, from the first stories to the latest. Mainstream media is not always satisfying to WSers, as reporters never know what LE knows, but it is the best we have, unless there are "insiders" posting here. I had the Wikipedia link in here but it is huge and has a picture and is linked above.