A look at WikiProject Medicine, a collection of ~35,000 English Wikipedia articles checked rigorously by ~150 editors with public health and medical expertise
many with medical degrees and expertise — are closely monitoring and scrutinizing edits to articles about COVID-19. Here's how @WikiProjectMed operates to protect the facts and keep misinformation off the site. https://www.wired.com/... Nicholas Thompson / @nxthompson : I'm old enough to remember when we trusted the President more than Wikipedia during times of crisis. https://www.wired.com/... @wired : Wikipedia, the mammoth online project, has finally developed a personality, a purpose, a soul. Now, as the new coronavirus outbreak plays out across its many pages, we can see that Wikipedia has also developed a conscience. https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Wikipedia entered the pandemic with a structural weakness already documented: dwindling volunteer ranks losing ground to PR-paid editors. WikiProject Medicine is the counterexample — a standing corps of roughly 150 medically credentialed editors applying rigorous review across about 35,000 English-language health articles, now concentrated on COVID-19 pages at the moment of maximum misinformation risk.
First-order effects
- The ~150 expert editors become the de facto gatekeepers of COVID-19 information on the world's most-visited reference site, scrutinizing every edit to outbreak-related articles in real time.
- Nicholas Thompson's framing — trusting Wikipedia over the President during a crisis — positions the project as a trusted source precisely when official channels are themselves contested.
Second-order effects
- The model scales through official partnership: months later the WHO granted Wikipedia free use of its published data for redistribution in nearly 200 languages, starting with COVID-19 — turning volunteer curation into institutional distribution.
- The same protection playbook gets reused beyond medicine: by October 2020 Wikipedia applied its COVID-19 misinformation defenses to lock down its main 2020 election page, restricting new editors from making changes.
Third-order effects
- Wikipedia is consolidating into semi-institutional critical infrastructure — expert-governed, officially sourced, and defended like an election system — which raises the stakes of its internal legitimacy fights, as later seen in the editors' battle over including the coronavirus lab leak theory and the debate over citing Fox News as a 'marginally reliable' source.
The trend: Crisis-era Wikipedia is hardening from an open volunteer encyclopedia into a curated fact infrastructure that governments and health bodies formally rely on.