What if you tried to print Wikipedia?
Get a copy of What If? 2 and Randall’s other books at: https://xkcd.com/books
More serious answers to absurd questions at: https://what-if.xkcd.com/
If you had a printed version of the whole of Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version?
Credits
*******
Randall Munroe | Narrator
Henry Reich | Writer & Director
Lizah van der Aart | Illustration and Video Editing
Ever Salazar | Chief Chaos Controller
Know Art Studios | Music & Sound Effects
What If? The Video Series is the official adaptation of the What If? books by Randall Munroe and is produced by Neptune Studios LLC.
Randall Munroe is the author of the New York Times bestsellers What If? 2, How To, What If?, and Thing Explainer; the science question-and-answer blog What If?; and the popular web comic xkcd (https://xkcd.com). A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time.
Henry Reich is the creator of MinutePhysics and executive producer of MinuteEarth and MinuteFood and founder of Neptune Studios LLC (the parent company for all three youtube channels).
©2024 xkcd, inc.
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Video Summary & Chapters
1. Printing Wikipedia
Exploring the idea of printing the entire Wikipedia
2. Previous Attempts
Looking at previous attempts to print Wikipedia content
3. Keeping Up with Edits
Analyzing the challenge of keeping printed Wikipedia up to date
4. Size Estimation
Estimating the size of a printed version of English Wikipedia
5. Cost Analysis
Calculating the expenses involved in printing and managing Wikipedia
6. Ink Cartridge Nightmare
Discussing the high cost of ink cartridges in the printing process
7. Potential Challenges
Considering potential challenges like a Wikipedia blackout and associated costs
8. Final Thoughts
Reflecting on the feasibility of printing Wikipedia in the digital age
Video Transcript
this question comes from Suzanne who
asks if you had a printed version of the
whole of Wikipedia how many printers
would you need in order to keep up with
the changes made to the live version for
the English Wikipedia you'd need this
many six printers is surprisingly few
but before you try to create a live
updating paper version of Wikipedia
let's look at what those printers would
be doing and how much they'd cost people
have considered printing out Wikipedia
before in 2012 Rob Matthews printed
every featured article creating a book a
couple feet thick and in 2015 Michael
mberg created art installation to show
the scope of Wikipedia by printing
around 1% of its articles although
without images the entire encyclopedia
would be a lot bigger Wikipedia user Tom
PW has set up a Wikipedia page that
calculates the current size of the whole
English Wikipedia without images in
printed volumes it would currently fill
a lot of bookshelves but most libraries
have far more books keeping up with the
edits would be harder English Wikipedia
currently receives about 150,000 edits
each day or 100 per minute we could try
to define a way to measure the word
count of the average edit but that's
hard bordering on Impossible and
fortunately we don't need to we can just
estimate that each change is going to
require us to reprint a page somewhere
now many edits will actually change
multiple pages but many other edits are
reverts which would let us put back
pages that we've already printed so one
page per edit seems like a reasonable
middle ground for a mix of photos tables
and text typical of Wikipedia a good
injet printer might put out 15 pages per
minute this means you'd only need about
six printers running at any given time
to keep Pace with the roughly 100 edits
each minute the paper would stack up
quickly using Rob matthews's book as a
starting point I did my own back of the
envelope at estimate for the size of the
