Saturday
Sep082007
Room on your shelves for Wikipedia?
Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 07:43AM 
If the English version of Wikipedia were printed out (as of August 2007) from Nikola Smolenski (via Stephen's Lighthouse blog).
Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ≈ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them.
Yikes!
Reader Comments (4)
The most amazing part of that (to me) is that there's 7.5gb of text there. I have more podcasts that I'll never listen to on my computer than that.
But just think, John, that if transcribed, you podcasts would probably only amount to 256K of text ;-)
Doug
Considering how many people in just my little corner of the world are still wedded to paper versions of reference materials, I wouldn't at all be surprised if the most popular articles in Wikipedia have already been printed many times.
Tim,
Your district isn't now paperless like ours?
Oh wait. Our print shop still does 8 million copies a year. And then there are the building copiers and computer printers. Never mind.
Doug