Wikipedia:Size in volumes

The current size of English Wikipedia per logical mathematical calculation without images.

1629 volumes 8 stacks

Assumptions

• This shows 1798m words across 3.2m articles (for 31/01/10), implying 562 words per article the number of bytes per article (and presumably words/article) itself has shown steady increase. It might be about 10% higher now.
• Same source shows 14 GB across 1798m words, implying 7.79B/word. ASCII uses 1B/character which in turn implies 7.79 characters/word. However, since this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space is standard, 6 characters/word will be assumed.
• 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 = &100000000080000000000008,000,000 characters, or &100000000013333330000001,333,333 words.

Numbers as of today

• At this moment, there are 3,862,723 articles. Using this calculation method, this means &100000021708503260000002,170,850,326 words, which means &1000001302510195600000013,025,101,956 characters.
• Thus WP is currently equivalent to &100000000000016280999991,628.1 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Sanity check: Encyclopædia Britannica has 44 million words across 32 volumes, or 1,375,000 words per volume. This would imply &100000000000015780000001,578 volumes for WP.

Source: User:Tompw/bookshelf

See also

• Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:Size comparisons
• Wikipedia:Statistics
• How much would Wikipedia cost? (calculation details at the talk page)
• Size of all Wikipedia versions