How Wikipedia Prevents the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation | WIRED

"The coronavirus articles on English Wikipedia are part of WikiProject Medicine, a collection of some 35,000 articles that are watched over by nearly 150 editors with interest and expertise in medicine and public health. (A survey for a paper co-written by Heilman in 2015 concluded that roughly half of the core editors had an advanced degree.) Readers of Wikipedia wouldn’t know that an article is part of the project—the designation appears on a separate talk page and really serves as a head’s up to interested editors to look carefully at the entries.

Once an article has been flagged as relating to medicine, the editors scrutinize the article with an exceptional ferocity. While typically an article in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal would be a reliable source for Wikipedia, the medical editors insist on peer-reviewed papers, textbooks or reports from prominent centers and institutes. On these subjects, Wikipedia doesn’t seem like the encyclopedia anyone can edit, striving to be welcoming to newcomers; it certainly doesn’t profess a laid-back philosophy that articles improve over time and can start off a bit unevenly. The editor chastised by Heilman hasn’t returned to the article and instead is improving articles about sound-recording equipment...."