The COVID-19 pandemic was covered in Wikipedia extensively, in real-time, and across multiple languages. This coverage extends to many detailed articles about various aspects of the topic itself, as well as many existing articles being amended to take account of the pandemic's effect on them. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects' coverage of the pandemic – and how the volunteer editing community achieved that coverage – received widespread media attention for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and speed. Wikipedia experienced an increase in readership during the pandemic.

The Wikimedia Foundation reported that on all Wikipedias from 1 December 2019 to 8 December 2020, 6,950 articles related to COVID-19 had been created, and 983,395 edits had been made to COVID-19-related articles by 97,088 editors. Additionally, in the same one-year time frame, COVID-19 related articles across all Wikipedias received 579,190,316 pageviews.

One study found that Wikipedia's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic from January to May 2020 referenced trusted media sources and high-quality academic research. Another study observed that Wikipedia's traffic tended to match the intensity of other COVID-19 discussion in the media ecosystem, rather than the ongoing and steady severity of the pandemic. A December 2020 study showed that nearly two percent of COVID-19-related literature had been cited on Wikipedia.

In mid-March 2020, journalist Noam Cohen said that editors' work on articles related to the pandemic demonstrated "that Wikipedia has also developed a conscience." Cohen described how Wikipedia's efforts to combat misinformation related to the pandemic differed from some other major websites and opined, "Unless Twitter, Facebook and the others can learn to address misinformation more effectively, Wikipedia will remain the last best place on the Internet."

Wikipedia experienced an increase in readership during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, according to the newspaper Dawn, when reports of cases in Wuhan emerged in December 2019 at the start of the pandemic, Wikipedia editors averaged 163 edits per hour to COVID-related pages. Across 188 Wikipedia languages, there were nearly 7,000 articles related to the pandemic as of November 2021.

In his article "Why Wikipedia Is Immune to Coronavirus", Omer Benjakob of Haaretz wrote, "Wikipedia has stepped in to provide relief. So much so that it has become the go-to source for COVID-19 information." Editors have worked diligently to remove misinformation. The World Health Organization announced it was working with the Wikimedia Foundation to help freely license its infographics and other material on COVID-19 to help in the work's effort to fight misinformation related to COVID-19, with plans to do similar in the future for other infectious diseases.

Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington Information School, said in August 2020 that Wikipedia has handled COVID-19 "overall, exceptionally well." In January 2021, the BBC remarked that in 2020, hundreds of Wikipedia editors had covered just about every aspect of the pandemic.

In June 2021, Jackson Ryan of CNET reported on Wikipedia's "endless war" over the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis. Some editors were reported to have been caught setting up "sock puppet" accounts to reinforce their own point of view and push dubious sources. Other editors were reported to have expressed concerns about possible Chinese state actors suppressing discussion of the hypothesis, without providing definitive evidence. In July 2021, British science writer Matt Ridley criticized Wikipedia for "long bann[ing] any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory." Ridley himself is a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis.

In a July 2021 The Atlantic article, writer Renée DiResta wrote about how the United States government's efforts to combat misinformation needed a "better system for communicating with the public." DiResta refers to Wikipedia as a good model for how this should be done, stating that "The crowdsourced reference site is the simplest, most succinct summary of the current state of knowledge on almost any subject you can imagine," and that this approach would allow "far more complete and up-to-date [information] than individual press releases."

In August 2021, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wrote in Al Jazeera that "When the COVID-19 pandemic changed life as we know it, volunteer editors on Wikipedia acted in real-time to combat disinformation and ensure the world had access to science-based health resources, across 188 languages and every continent. Through an open, decentralised model, Wikipedians created unparalleled amounts of accurate, life-saving content."

Wikipedia editors follow a set of "contentious topics" standards to prevent misinformation and vandalism. These topics encompass all "specially-designated topics that have attracted more persistent disruptive editing than the rest of the project". The contentious topic rules state that administrators have the ability to restrict editors causing disruption or to restrict entire pages if there's constant disruption.

A year after its first creation, the main COVID-19 pandemic Wikipedia article in English had become the 34th most viewed article on the website of all time, with almost 32,000 inbound links from other articles, according to The New Republic. As of February 2023, Wikipedia's Top 100 most-viewed pages chart lists the article for the COVID-19 pandemic as the 65th most-viewed article ever and the article for Coronavirus as the 5th most-viewed life-related article ever.

The "2019–2020 China pneumonia outbreak" Wikipedia article, which evolved into the English Wikipedia's main article about the pandemic, was created on 5 January 2020 by a user from China. Wikipedia entries were subsequently created for "Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" and "Coronavirus disease 2019". By 9 February, the main article had been edited more than 6,500 times by approximately 1,200 editors, and six of the primary Wikipedia articles about the pandemic were viewed more than 18 million times. Other early entries included an overview of the pandemic by country and territory, a timeline, and another focused on xenophobia and racism. The Wikipedia pages about bats as food, the Corona beer brand, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Wuhan also saw increased editing.

As the pandemic spread, editors worked to keep up with the barrage of new information and misinformation being added to the site. Information on Wikipedia was used to create data visualizations and shared on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media platforms. More than 2,100 editors had contributed to the main article about the pandemic by 19 March.

Editor affinity groups known as WikiProjects helped to supervise the English Wikipedia's pandemic coverage, monitoring articles for changes, offering feedback, enforcing rigorous source quality standards, and translating articles into Wikipedias of other languages. A new WikiProject dedicated to the disease and pandemic had 90 members by late March 2020. Prominent Wikipedia editors involved in these projects included James Heilman and Jason Moore.

Wikipedia editors deleted and later restored an entry called "2020 Tablighi Jamaat COVID-19 hotspot in Delhi", which project co-founder Jimmy Wales said "was incredibly poorly written and had zero sources". Wired's Omer Benjakob reports that prior to deletion, the article contained Islamophobic claims that the local Muslim community was the cause of the spread of the disease in India, along with claims that Muslims at a local medical center were seen "molesting nurses and spitting on hospital staff ... [and even] reportedly found defecating in the hospital corridor". Wales later responded to accusations on Twitter, stating that Wikipedia did not accept payment for the article's deletion.