Wikipedia is big. Anyone familiar with the site knows that it is an over-the-top labyrinth of knowledge. But can you imagine the size of the site if someone could print out all the information it contains? Like the Encyclopedia Britannica of yesteryear. The result – based on user Tompw – is smaller than you might think. If Wikipedia were books, it would be 1,908 volumes long.
Let's look at the numbers, according to Tompw:
* Contains 2,537 million words in 4.3 million articles (August 2013), which means on average 590 words per article.
* The same source shows 19.83 GB (= 20,498,960 B) in 2.537 million words.
* Currently there are 4,309,877 articles, which means 2,542,827,430 words, which means 15,256,964,580 characters, so a word is about 8.08 B.
* A book: 25cm tall, 5cm thick. 500 sheets, with pages double‑sided, two columns per page, 80 lines per column, 50 characters per line. Thus we have a book with = 8.000.000 characters, or 1.333.337 words, or 2,259.9 articles.
* Thus, the text of the Wikipedia website today is equivalent to 1,907.1 volumes of the Britannica encyclopedia.
* The Encyclopædia Britannica has 44 million words in 32 volumes, or 1,375,000 words per volume. This would mean 1,849 volumes for Wikipedia's content.
Although most likely the calculations are not accurate, it appears that the online encyclopedia is constantly evolving.
And for the record, here is a depiction of Wikipedia in books. You can see the image clearly in the link above.
