I may be missing something, but this is probably a very GOOD thing for wikipedia. The best place for information in any given field is professional peer reviewed journals in that field. The publication rates in the most prestigious journals are demoralizingly low; some journal rejection rates for 1st submissions are upwards of 95%. Manuscripts that are eventually published often go through several rounds of detailed revision between the authors, editors, and reviewers. And once the article is published it's wide open to be scrutinized by other professionals who can then publish critiques and in some cases even necessitate corrections or retractions of the original publication. Again, these are all good things; it's no where near perfect, but things that humans do, and perfect don't belong in the same sentence. Over time this is a relatively good filtering device for archiving information.
A rough estimate of how many people successfully publish in these journals would probably be less than the percentage of the population that have PhD's, MD's or other professional degrees usually possessed by at least one of the authors of a peer reviewed publication. Someone is more than welcome to go get the stats and get a good estimate; my point is simply that it's a small number of people. This is also a very good thing.
The less likely some idiot is to post things like Ted Kennedy is dead; or the fewer Scientologists......well, never-mind I won't go there ;) As far as I can tell; the basic structure of wikipedia still allows any one to contribute. Hopefully, over a relatively short period of time; if you contribute somethings stupid, it should be gone, and replaced with referenced material by the smaller number of people who have the integrity to research and think before they have the audacity to say something to millions of people.
End of (my first ever) rant; go ahead, tear me apart ;)