Is Wikipedia the antidote to what's wrong with the internet? It is a big question, but Katherine Maher – chief steward of the greatest collection of knowledge in the entire history of human civilisation – tackles it enthusiastically.

"Absolutely," she says. "I think the truth is, [all] our products and services would be better if they were more organic and locally governed... that has won for people. The problem is that the rest of the web has lost for people."

Maher (pronounced "Mahr") is the head of the Wikimedia Foundation – but not, she stresses, the boss of Wikipedia. Rather, she runs the charity trusted (most of the time) to maintain Wikipedia by the committed, meticulous and sometimes eccentric community of volunteer editors who, without formal leaders, laws or orders from above, actually govern the site.

That is what she tells the Telegraph just before Christmas in her San Francisco office, in a lost and faraway world where interviews are still conducted in person. But today, the Foundation's 370-or-so employees are in lockdown and Wikipedia itself is an urgent resource for hundreds of millions of people searching for life-saving information.

Traffic records, Maher now says (over video chat), have been "shattered", and all priority is on simply keeping the site online. There are now 283 distinct coronavirus articles in English alone (one of 309 languages), and the largest of them, "2019-20 coronavirus pandemic", has received 20 million views and more than 17,000 edits. The eyes of the world, almost literally, are upon Wikipedia.

That puts its decentralised, anarchic ethos under unprecedented strain. The World Health Organisation speaks of an "infodemic" driven by earnest confusion as well as trolls and propagandists.

How can a service that anyone can edit, lacking the army of paid moderators and sophisticated artificial intelligence deployed by Facebook and Youtube, stand against the tide? The perverse answer seems to be: pretty well.

'It shouldn't work, but it does'

"Wikipedia does an extraordinarily good job of crowdsourcing the truth," says Dipayan Ghosh, a former Obama aide who now studies digital democracy at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

In the short term, he says, fake facts can often "slip through the cracks" for a few days. Its coronavirus pages have not been entirely clean.But in general, it is "far more effective in containing the spread of misinformation than social networks."