In un articolo in cui tratta di grandi scenari del web, e della loro irrilevanza per la progettazione di un buon sito, Jakob Nielsen esalta Wikipedia per aver recuperato l’essenza fondante del web: l’ipertestualità:
The Wikipedia’s most exciting aspect is that it’s a highly interlinked hypertext. Most of the time, if you visit for one article, you end up reading five, because the richness of associative links lead you to more and more interesting information that you didn’t even know you wanted. Sadly, the Web has generally lost its foundation as hypertext, and most sites offer only heavily regimented navigation that’s tied into an official information architecture. Usually, there’s little in the way of associative, “see also” links and local navigation. Wikipedia shows the benefits of reverting to the view of websites as hypertexts.