User:Tompw/bookshelf/doc

This is a documentation subpage for User:Tompw/bookshelf.
It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original user template page.

Usage

To insert this chart, use the text {{User:Tompw/bookshelf}}

Its main use is on the page Wikipedia:Size in volumes

Assumptions

As of 1 December 2024, Special:Statistics showed 4,761,085,140 words across 6,918,041 articles implying an average of 688 words per article.
As of 2021, 33.997 GB (=33,997,900,893 bytes) across four billion words, implying 8.3 bytes/word. ASCII uses 1 byte/character which in turn implies 8.3 characters/word. However, this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space or punctuation mark is standard, so 6 characters/word will be assumed.
There are currently 6,924,001 articles, which means 4.76516672821×10^⁹ words, which means 4.76516672821×10^⁹ characters.
One volume: 25cm high, 5cm thick. 500 leaves, 2 pagefaces per leaf, 2 columns per pageface, 80 rows/column, 50 characters per row. So one volume = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,333 words, or 1,937.4 articles. (Pictures not included!)
- Sanity check: Encyclopædia Britannica has 44 million words across 32 volumes, or 1,375,000 words per volume.
Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 3,573.9 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
- In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 111.68 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
- The total size would be 8.9m³. This is substantially less than stated in this video, which has 300m³ – but that figure is based on Rob Matthews' artwork Bookifying Wikipedia. Matthews included all featured articles, with images and tables, and unknown text density. Different assumptions, different results.

Transcluded pages

User:Tompw/bookshelf/volumes: number of volumes (3574)
User:Tompw/bookshelf/stacks: number of stacks (18)
User:Tompw/bookshelf/stack200: a full stack (10 rows; 200 volumes)
User:Tompw/bookshelf/stack200v: a partially filled stack
User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20: a full row (20 volumes)
User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20v: a partially-filled row
User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20e: an empty row
User:Tompw/bookshelf/assumptions: assumptions (transcluded above)

Maths articles

Source: User:Tompw/bookshelf/mathematics (no longer updated as of 2015)

10 volumes

Other languages