Visit the New Technabob Shop!Get Technabob in Your Mailbox Every Day! Join our Mailing List!
Awesomer Media Sites: THE AWESOMER | MIGHTYMEGA | 95OCTANE
subscribe to our rss feedsubscribe via e-mailfollow technabob on twittertechnabob facebook fan pageGoogle+follow us in feedly
Follow Us:

If Wikipedia Had a Print Edition

by Hazel Chua

How long has it been since you actually cracked an encyclopedia open? Most people head straight to their computers and Google whatever it is they need more information on these days. Few, if any, still turn to the volumes of Britannica or Funk and Wagnalls, because what’s printed there is likely to be outdated.

the_size_of_wikipedia

Many searches for info on Google direct you straight to Wikipedia, which I’m sure you’ve already used or at least are familiar with. Wikipedia boasts of being available in a bevy of languages and containing entries from most fields, including current events.

But what if all the entries on Wikipedia were sorted and printed into physical volumes? How many volumes would there be, and how much space would all of them take up? The answer, thanks to Wikipedia editor Tompw is 1,908. For clarity, that’s 1,908 Encyclopedia Britannica-sized volumes that will occupy almost 10 entire shelves!

There are currently 4,309,964 articles, which means 2,542,878,760 words, which means 15,257,272,560 characters.

One volume: 25cm high, 5cm thick. 500 leaves, 2 pagefaces per leaf, two columns per pageface, 80 rows/column, 50 characters per row. So one volume = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,333 words, or 2,259.9 articles.

Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 1,907.2 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Of course, this number keeps growing. Thank heavens for the Internet.

[via Geekologie]




Post a Comment:

Want a personal avatar on your comments? Sign up for a free Gravatar now!

Note: All comments with links in them will be held for moderation in order to prevent spam, so you may not see your post appear immediately.


« Previous
Next »

Our Latest & Greatest Posts...

Iron Man Life-size Mk. XLIII Helmet Bluetooth Speaker: Headphone

Iron Man Life-size Mk. XLIII Helmet Bluetooth Speaker: Headphone

Flyte Levitating Light Bulb: The Lightest Light

Flyte Levitating Light Bulb: The Lightest Light

Deal: Save 52% on These XTC Genuine Wood Headphones

Deal: Save 52% on These XTC Genuine Wood Headphones

Amazing Oreo Trick Shots

Amazing Oreo Trick Shots

Marutaro The Hedgehog Collects Golden Rings

Marutaro The Hedgehog Collects Golden Rings

Win Prizes in the Technabob Shop

More from Awesomer Media...

The Awesomer Logo MightyMega Logo 95octane Logo
http://technabob.com/blog/2013/08/25/wikipedia-print-edition/
technabob.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
41702
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CGWXFLNEVQ2GLTRLZN2KF2XBSYY5T7LV
<urn:uuid:96afe509-873d-44f6-9d7a-46d14f0a8749>
2015-04-25T00:22:25Z
198.41.249.85
sha1:7CCNSDWHOZCPKTDWEYWI7DDAY6SKXESG
<urn:uuid:3e46b664-2669-4bc5-ad7f-d1a77b9fd61c>
http://technabob.com/blog/2013/08/25/wikipedia-print-edition/
length
response
<urn:uuid:28d22bf9-88c8-4d3e-8e0c-08ae7f285dad>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf