>Git does the rest.
No, it doesn't. But this does, kind of:
> Disk got a lot cheaper and the incentive to have only one copy of something is gone.
Not only that but thanks to simple regexp (such as 's/source/target/g/') it is much easier to replace copies of the same text. With proper tools (which Wikipedia undoubtedly has) it should be easy to change text with one click of a button.
Exactly! Today we have room for everyone to have his or her own copy of every document he or she needs to access. Client/server has changed and now you can serve-up your own copies of stuff. RegEx, though hateful, is functional and it can be used to grab and quote or grab and manipulate any piece of an existing document. We don't need to invent those parts. :-)
- Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. There isn't that much content people will pay for. Especially user-editable content. One proposal was expensive investment newsletters. The Bloomberg terminal is the exemplar of that model.
- Ted Nelson had strong ideas about how the implementation should work, and he's a terrible database architect.
- Nelson was very text-oriented. Pictures? Video? Not even considered.
- Search? What's that? This was pre-Alta Vista, let alone Google.
- The original design was very centralized. This was pre- world wide web.
- If you're not doing the micropayments thing, trying to pay every contributor for their few words, a wiki does most of what you need. Git does the rest.
- In a distributed implementation, keeping all those "transclusion" links in sync requires elaborate distributed database synchronization. A dead link in Xanadu means a gap in the text.
- Disk got a lot cheaper and the incentive to have only one copy of something is gone.