Can Internal links beat external?

[member22]

I just read something online that says that " For every 1000 to 1500 words of topical content, this is equivalent to a strong backlink to your site from a trusted authority."

Do this mean than it is the way wikipedia does it ?
let's take their word tennis [en.wikipedia.org...]

They have different categories in their page : history, scoring, tournament etc... and in each category they use the keywords that are related to that category and link it to the right page , it is the way they rank ?

[tedster]

It is how they circulate PageRank internally. With all their content, they don't really have a main menu to speak of, at least not in the ordinary sense, so these in-content links are the only real circulation mechanism they've got going for them.

However, Wikipedia's real ranking power definitely comes from external backlinks. They have a TON and most of them point to specific internal pages.

For every 1000 to 1500 words of topical content, this is equivalent to a strong backlink to your site from a trusted authority

Sounds a bit crazy, at least out of context. Content is about relevance, whereas links are about strength, trust, authority. Different parts of the overall algorithm.