How Large Would a Print Edition of Wikipedia Be?

wikipediaprint.gifSometimes it doesn't even occur to you ask a question until its been posed by someone else. Once asked, it occurs to you that it's something you really should have been pondering all along. Take, for example, one Wikipedia writer's query: how many pages would it take to print out a hard copy of the online dictionary? I don't feel particularly bad having not posed the question, though, seeing as how it would have been completely lost by my utter lack of anything remotely resembling math skills.

Nikola Smolenski, however, did ask the question. In calculating the answer, he used the following parameters [courtesy of Boing Boing], "Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 leaves), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ˜ 6MB per volume." Subtracting the History and Discuss pages and images (which would apparently have taken up more printing real estate that the text), the result is 4.4GB worth of text for the English version of the site.

That comes out to about 750 encyclopedia volumes, according to his estimates. One wonders how dramatically this number be reduced if one subtracted all of the information that wasn't you know, true...

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