A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.
I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.
Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.
These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...
But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.
Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.
Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.
If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.
Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.
Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.