Hyper Publishing: The Wiki Strategy

Author: David Perell URL: https://www.perell.com/blog/wiki-strategy One-line: Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet — and the “Wiki Strategy” (a term from Nat Eliason) uses them to turn one-time visitors into loyal readers by interlinking evergreen content into a compounding network.

Note: Companion to Hyper Publishing; this installment is the conceptual ancestor of the wiki Kyle is building — a network of hyperlinked, evergreen pages that compound in value.

Key claims

• Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet — “tour guides that guide from website to website” — and most companies underestimate their power. They juxtapose unrelated ideas and reshape the relationship between companies and customers.
• The Bible is one of the world’s largest hyperlinked documents — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses, 63,779 cross-references — and stays influential by connecting disparate stories into a cohesive structure. “A network of individuals is infinitely more intelligent than any single person.”
• The hyperlink predates the internet. Ted Nelson coined the term in 1965 (Project Xanadu), inspired by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think, which envisioned a machine that mimics the mind’s associative “trails of thought” and supplements human memory.
• Books store information but can’t create idea trails — too much friction. Every webpage, by contrast, is “both a node and a connection in a vast, global network of information.”
• Wikipedia is the proof of concept — an anomaly that defied precedent and demonstrated “the under-appreciated power of large crowds of coordinated individuals acting in their self-interest and contributing to a collective goal” (15B+ page views/month).
• Social media is a nightclub; a good blog is a college campus. Blogs signal status and expertise, benefit from word-of-mouth, and the faster a site turns a new reader into a loyal one, the more successful it is.
• Evergreen content compounds. Past critical mass, websites become “expansive ecosystems of articles and ideas”; repeat visitors have higher lifetime value and evangelize the brand (Personal Websites).

Notable quotes

“Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet.”

“By incorporating insights from countless individuals, the Bible remains the most influential text in human history. Held together by a web of hyperlinks, the Bible connects hundreds of disparate stories and ideas into a cohesive structure.”

“People who doubted Wikipedia didn’t just doubt the power of networks — they doubted the power of the hyperlink.”

“As the Bible shows, a network of individuals is infinitely more intelligent than any single person.”

How it connects

• Hyper Publishing — the parent essay; this extends the modular-publishing thesis to hyperlinks.
• Wikipedia / Roam Research — the canonical and personal models of hyperlinked knowledge.
• Ted Nelson — coined “hyperlink”; the prehistory of the linked web.
• Nat Eliason — origin of the “Wiki Strategy” term.
• Personal Websites / Writing — the practical surfaces where the strategy plays out.
• This wiki itself is a working instance of the Wiki Strategy described here.