Wikipedia:Size in volumes

Shortcuts

This page displays the current size of a hypothetical print edition of the English Wikipedia (without images) in print volumes, per mathematical calculation.

3536 volumes
18 stacks

Assumptions and calculations

As of 21 August 2024, Special:Statistics showed 4,685,752,743 words across 6,870,428 articles implying an average of 682 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 6,911,370 articles, which means 4.7136925674×10^⁹ words, which means 2.82821554044×10^¹⁰ 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 1,963.3 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 3,535.3 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
- In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 110.48 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
- The total size would be 8.8m³. 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.

Print Wikipedia

In June 2015, artist Michael Mandiberg (User:Theredproject) generated a 7,473-volume print-ready collection of the English Wikipedia in PDF format, printed wallpaper representing the spines of the books, and printed over 100 volumes through print on demand service Lulu, as part of an art installation at the Denny Gallery in New York City. The table of contents alone took 91 volumes to list the nearly 11.5 million articles.^[1]^[2]

References

^ Schuessler, Jennifer (16 June 2015). "Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 June 2015.
^ "Github site mandiberg/printwikipedia". Retrieved 2015-07-02.

External links

"Wikipedia Encyclopedia as a Printed Book". Labno.org. 15 July 2012.
"What if? Updating a Printed Wikipedia". xkcd. August 2013.
- What if you tried to print Wikipedia? (video version of the What if? entry above). July 2024.

[1] Schuessler, Jennifer (16 June 2015). "Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 June 2015.

[2] "Github site mandiberg/printwikipedia". Retrieved 2015-07-02.

[1]

[2]

Assumptions and calculations

Print Wikipedia

See also

References

External links