I am going to attempt to compare Wikipedia to Xanadu but would appreciate your help because I found the readings hard to get through.

In both Xanadu and Wikipedia, the user can edit and create documents. However, I think the user has more control over Wikipedia than Xanadu. Xanadu tracks changes made to text so people can understand where the current line of thought originated. All versions of a document are preserved in Xanadu. This reminds me of Wikipedia’s history page. On Wikipedia’s history page, you can click on a date when a change was made to bring up the old version. In both Wikipedia and Xanadu, you can compare previous revisions to a document side by side. Documents in Xanadu can be annotated. This makes me think of Wikipedia’s discussion page where users can discuss revisions.

Wikipedia and Xanadu both use hypertext to provide links to an array of content within a closed system but Wikipedia often has links that don’t work. One of Xanadu’s goals was to have non-breaking links to permanently stored documents which can’t be removed from the system. I think the nature of Xanadu’s links is different than what the web currently allows. Nelson (1999) talks about having thousands of overlapping links on the same body of content called transclusions. Therefore, links are infinite instead of today’s one way connection.

 I often see articles in Wikipedia without proper references. Xanadu proposes a system of copyright called transcopyright (Nelson, 1997 as cited by Nelson, 1999) where the “quote is connected to the original work so that readers can locate the context from which an excerpt was drawn” (Denning, 1998 as cited by Nelson, 1999). This system also includes giving credit and possibly monetary compensation to the original author of works included in any derivatives such as mash-ups.

Here is a video of Ted Nelson talking about the difference between the Internet and Xanadu.

 Nelson, Theodore. (1999). “Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use.” Available: http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html