The enormity! The sheer enormity!

[Mancunium]

On Indiegogo: Smart Marketing Stunt Seeks $50,000 To Put Wikipedia In Print
Crowdfund Insider, 12 February 2014 link

Could you imagine being able to visualize the sheer enormity of Wikipedia’s English articles? The free online encyclopedia has been in the works for well over a decade now, and – according to itself, ironically – it now nets 500 million unique visitors and 18 billion page views a month. A group of developers that work on PediaPress want to print the entirety of Wikipedia’s 4.4-million-plus English language articles. The project is half artistic exhibition and half brilliant marketing. PediaPress exists to allow people the ability to order printed books from Wikipedia content. What better way to advertise your service than a crowdfunding campaign to take your service to its logical limit?

The final product would be 1,000 books at 1,200 pages per. Each book would have continuous page numbers, from 1 to 1,193,014. (I shudder considering the glossary) The exhibit would be displayed at Wikimania London in August 2014. The campaign is currently live on Indiegogo and is seeking $50,000 for the project [...]

e·nor·mi·ty
iˈnôrmitē/
noun: enormity; plural noun: enormities
1.
the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong.
"a thorough search disclosed the full enormity of the crime"
2.
a grave crime or sin.
"the enormities of the regime"
synonyms: wickedness, evil, vileness, baseness, depravity;
outrageousness, monstrousness, hideousness, heinousness, horror, atrocity;
villainy, cruelty, inhumanity, mercilessness, brutality, savagery, viciousness;
outrage, horror, evil, atrocity, barbarity, abomination, monstrosity, obscenity, iniquity;
crime, sin, violation, wrong, offense, disgrace, injustice, abuse.

See you at the bonfire!

[thekohser]

Hey, this might not be a bad idea for MyWikiBiz!

$1,000USD +
Your Logo On One Book
1 out of 50 claimed
Is your company in Wikipedia? Be the corporate sponsor of the corresponding book. Add a dedication and have your logo placed on the back of the book. You'll also receive a copy of the book.


$1,001USD +
Your Special Wish
0 claimed
Do you have a sponsoring idea not listed above? Just contact us and we'll figure something out.

For $1,001, let's see... Will you drop my volume on Jimbo's head from a ladder at Wikimania 2014?


Note: Above comment is purely for comedic purposes. No actual physical stalker-like threat, wish, desire, or whim is actually intended in the comment.

[Mancunium]

Hey, this might not be a bad idea for MyWikiBiz!

$1,000USD +
Your Logo On One Book
1 out of 50 claimed
Is your company in Wikipedia? Be the corporate sponsor of the corresponding book. Add a dedication and have your logo placed on the back of the book. You'll also receive a copy of the book.


$1,001USD +
Your Special Wish
0 claimed
Do you have a sponsoring idea not listed above? Just contact us and we'll figure something out.

For $1,001, let's see... Will you drop my volume on Jimbo's head from a ladder at Wikimania 2014?


Note: Above comment is purely for comedic purposes. No actual physical stalker-like threat, wish, desire, or whim is actually intended in the comment.

Now Jimbo will demand the presence, at Wikimania 2014, of the Royalty Protection Branch of the Metropolitan Police Service-- because you, his nemesis, are obviously plotting to drop an object of great weight upon his head, and to do so from a great height.

If such were to befall him, the media would describe the event as "ironic".

[lilburne]

On Indiegogo: Smart Marketing Stunt Seeks $50,000 To Put Wikipedia In Print
Crowdfund Insider, 12 February 2014 link

Could you imagine being able to visualize the sheer enormity of Wikipedia’s English articles?

[Johnny Au]

It would be funny if the print version contains typos and vandalism.

[Mancunium]

It would be funny if the print version contains typos and vandalism.

I'm sure Jimbo will proofread it. It would be funny if the print version is confiscated in compliance with the Obscene Publications Act 1959, and with Part 5, sections 63 to 67, of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008: Possession of Extreme Pornographic Images: link.

Wiedergeburt eines Print-Dinosauriers
Buchreport, 13 February 2014 link

Google-translation from German link

Rebirth of a print dinosaur

Over 4.4 million articles, more than 20 million users - the English-language interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia has reached proportions which were hitherto hardly conceivable in printed form PediaPress wants to change this. The Wikimedia partners and print-on-demand provider wants to bring the complete online encyclopedia on paper. In order to finance the ambitious large-scale project, wants $ 50,000 of residents in Mainz print-on-demand provider via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo collect. The complete English Wikipedia with its 4.3 million articles to fill about 1,000 books each with 1200 pages. In this way, the Mainz want to visualize how big the Wikipedia project has become. Overall, the lexicons would a shelf area of 10 x 2.5 meter fill, PediaPress explained on indiegogo.com. Printed encyclopedias are to appear in black and white, with adequate funding and a color output would be possible. As the books are outdated within a few seconds, complementary "live updates" from the online platform to print on continuous paper.The result should at the annual Wikipedia conference, Wikimania will be exhibited in London in August 2014. [...] Also, the publisher Zenodot had planned in 2006 , the entire German Wikipedia in hard copy to publish - then the online article had 100 volumes filled with 800 pages each. The project was not realized because publisher could not agree on compensation, rights and licenses with the authors.

Printing Wikipedia: Introducing the Wikipedia Books Project:

[Mancunium]

Hey! With my trademark snarkiness I was able to edit 'Crowdfund Insider'; it now asks the the reader to visualize the sheer size of English Wikipedia's waste.


Printed encyclopedias are to appear in black and white,
with adequate funding and a color output would be possible.


As the books are outdated within a few seconds, complementary
"live updates" from the online platform to print on continuous paper.

[enwikibadscience]

Hey! With my trademark snarkiness I was able to edit 'Crowdfund Insider'; it now asks the the reader to visualize the sheer size of English Wikipedia's waste.


Printed encyclopedias are to appear in black and white,
with adequate funding and a color output would be possible.


As the books are outdated within a few seconds, complementary
"live updates" from the online platform to print on continuous paper.

How do they come up with this? It's the opposite of what Wikipedia is about. Who would buy an encyclopeia that is completely outdated before it is printed, scientiically inaccurate, full of hoaxes, copyvios and vandalism?

What's the point? And what was that meeting like, "You know what would be cool, let's cut down a forest and print 1200 books, then exceed the carbon footprint of the totality of BLM cattle, pay more than the cost of printing to ship the useless crap, and clebrate our accomplishment."

[EricBarbour]

How do they come up with this?

Because stupid people had the idea, probably because elderly folks don't know how to use PCs and want to read content. As the VDM Publishing firm has demonstrated, there is a massive gulf between Wikipedia online, and printed material. Very few are willing to pay for the "free" information in any form. Wikipedia is a creature of the twitching ADHD smartphone-button-pushing generation, not a "reference".

[Mancunium]

Wikipedia could become 1,193,014 page book
Wired, 18 February 2014 link

A campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo wants you to donate money to fund a project that will see Wikipedia be printed out page by page and turned into a regular old physical encyclopedia. "We think that the best way to experience the size of Wikipedia is by transforming it into the physical medium of books," the Wikipedia Book Project team writes on the campaign's Indiegogo page. "Containing the most volumes and edited by the largest number of contributors the printed edition will be a work of record breaking dimensions." Should the $50,000 (about £30,000) target be met, Wikipedia's 4 million articles will be printed out into 1,000 books of 1,200 pages each. There will be continuous page numbering through the volumes, with the final page being number 1,193,014. The initial plan is to print the books in greyscale, although colour printing is one of the team's strecth goals, should they beat their target. The books will be displayed in a case longer than 10 metres long at the annual Wikimania conference, due to be held in London's Barbican Centre this August.

It's possible that if there is enough interest and enough money is raised, the exhibition may then depart on a tour around the globe. Another stretch goal is to print live updates to Wikipedia on a continuous scroll of paper over the course of the exhibition in order to visualise the frequency with which Wikipedia is updated. [...] There is something strikingly counterintuitive about the whole project though, and with the divide between print and digital widening, the value of such an exercise should be questioned. For example, anyone with an environmental conscience might squirm at the idea of printing out thousands of pages for a project, when generally we are moving away from physically printing paper copies of anything when it's not completely necessary to do so. [...]

Printing Wikipedia: Introducing the Wikipedia Books Project

[eppur si muove]

Over a week gone and under $2K raised. It's not going to make it unless someone connected with the WMF decides that it has advertising value.

[enwikibadscience]

Over a week gone and under $2K raised. It's not going to make it unless someone connected with the WMF decides that it has advertising value.

Oh, such morons. They also have to raise money to transport 1000 books to the library where hey are donating it. In the US libraries are chronically short of money and space. It costs $50-$100 or more a book to input it into the system. Are they going to raise $100,000 plus build a new wing for the library accepted this crap that no librarian would want? Plus carbon offsets for the new wing, the transport gas?

What library will take these books?

[Vigilant]

It's the most pointless book since "How To Learn French" was translated into French.

[Mancunium]

Over a week gone and under $2K raised. It's not going to make it unless someone connected with the WMF decides that it has advertising value.

It's not that the project hasn't had enough publicity. There have been scores of uncritical puff pieces about it in the English-, German-, Dutch- and Swedish-language media.

[thekohser]

To their credit, I do think the actual layout of the printed Wikipedia articles (with graphics) in the three columns per page format is visually appealing.

[eppur si muove]

Over a week gone and under $2K raised. It's not going to make it unless someone connected with the WMF decides that it has advertising value.

It's not that the project hasn't had enough publicity. There have been scores of uncritical puff pieces about it in the English-, German-, Dutch- and Swedish-language media.

Quite. And we also know who many wiki fanatics read this site and will have seen this thread.

I've been active in the past on another crowd-funding site and know that most projects follow a u-shaped curve when it comes to bringing in money with the project-runners generating some initial interest on their own websites and getting enough initial money put in to attract interest from those who look out for interesting projects on the crowdfunding site. Then the press pick it up. This means that in the first week the project is active generates a huge chunk of what is required.

Then the project tends to go quiet until the last week. The only project I can think of which had a fairly even run, kept on introducing new stretch goals and paid for rewards. The last week then sees various people who have sat on their hands finally commit and therefore there is another surge.

In this case, the project owners are incompetent. They should have got together with their mates and put in $5-10K of their own money in the first couple of days to make it look as if there was some enthusiasm and to attract their attention. (If the project takes off, they can then gradually withdraw their money so that they don't pay the fees unnecessarily.) And they should have made some updates to keep those who have backed them enthusiastic so that they can bring in other people.

A stupid idea run by people who haven't a clue on how to make it work.

[Vigilant]

A stupid idea run by people who haven't a clue on how to make it work.

Are we back to "wikipedia taglines" or is this a new VisualEditor thread?

[enwikibadscience]

A stupid idea run by people who haven't a clue on how to make it work.

Are we back to "wikipedia taglines" or is this a new VisualEditor thread?

It's a multipurpose tagline.

[Mancunium]

To their credit, I do think the actual layout of the printed Wikipedia articles (with graphics) in the three columns per page format is visually appealing.

A visually-appealing bottle of poison is still what it is.

To their credit, they have found a way to make money off Wikipedia without the risk of being banned for life: PediaPress link

Creating custom E-Books from Wikipedia Wikipedia in Print - How to Create Custom Books Gedruckte Bücher aus der Wikipedia

[Mancunium]

I am loath to give this craptacular project more publicity, but today it revealed more of itself in an interview granted by a PediaPress spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous. Because, of course, the spokespeople of all reputable publishers speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Wikipedia goes back to the future with print edition
Metro US, 18 February 2014 link

[...] A PediaPress spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous told us more.

Metro: Wikipedia put encyclopedia tomes out of business by being more convenient. Why reverse that progress?

PediaPress: [...] art [...]

How will this benefit anyone?

We [...]

Will you edit the text or include all the mistakes?

[...] including where it is horribly broken or vandalized [...]

Are you worried about back injuries from carrying the 1 million-page book?

Certainly [...]

[Johnny Au]

I am loath to give this [censored] project more publicity, but today it revealed more of itself in an interview granted by a PediaPress spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous. Because, of course, the spokespeople of all reputable publishers speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Wikipedia goes back to the future with print edition
Metro US, 18 February 2014 link

[...] A PediaPress spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous told us more.

Metro: Wikipedia put encyclopedia tomes out of business by being more convenient. Why reverse that progress?

PediaPress: [...] art [...]

How will this benefit anyone?

We [...]

Will you edit the text or include all the mistakes?

[...] including where it is horribly broken or vandalized [...]

Are you worried about back injuries from carrying the 1 million-page book?

Certainly [...]

Now, that is a *facebook*

[Mancunium]

More thoughtless publicity.

New campaign launches to print Wikipedia as two million page book
ITProPortal, 19 February 2014 link
Interesting new fact: "If successful the project will result in over 4.3 million articles printed on 1,193,014 pages that will be displayed at the annual Wikimania event in London this summer, before being donated to libraries around the world."

Wikipedia encyclopaedia to become a million page book?
Hexus, 19 February 2014 link
Interesting new fact: "The team behind the campaign are from PediaPress, Wikimedia Foundation's official print-on-demand partner."

The whole of Wikipedia, in 1000 books.
The Periscope Press, 19 February 2014 link
Interesting new fact: "PrintPedia makes money by printing select contents from Wikipedia by request into book form and a portion of the sale from those print-on-demand books are also channeled back to Wikimedia Foundation.

Does the Wikimedia Foundation have no vendors who are not required to "channel" money back to them? I believe this is known as a "kickback scheme".

[Cedric]

[Mancunium]

PediaPress Wants To Print The Complete English Wikipedia In 1,000 Books
TechCrunch, 19 February 2014 [link]lhttp://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/pediapress-wants-to-print-the-complete-english-wikipedia-in-1000-books[/link]
Interest new facts: "This is not a joke." "The project also let you visualize how big Wikipedia is compared to the Encyclopædia Britannica."

Just as a giant pathogenic fungus is bigger than a breadbox.

[tarantino]

PediaPress Wants To Print The Complete English Wikipedia In 1,000 Books
TechCrunch, 19 February 2014 [link]lhttp://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/pediapress-wants-to-print-the-complete-english-wikipedia-in-1000-books[/link]
Interest new facts: "This is not a joke." "The project also let you visualize how big Wikipedia is compared to the Encyclopædia Britannica."

Just as a giant pathogenic fungus is bigger than a breadbox.

Oh, you're comparing Armillaria ostoyae to wikipedia. I suppose that is apt.

[Mancunium]

Printing All of Wikipedia in 1,000 Books? It's Not A Joke
NBC News, 19 February 2014 link
Interesting new fact: In 2009 somebody printed every Featured Article to create a single 5000-page book link

What's black and white and unread all over? A paper copy of Wikipedia [...]

[Thracia]

This story also popped up on the front page of the Guardian website today (UK edition).

The whole project is clearly a massive violation of WP:NOTPAPER.

[enwikibadscience]

This story also popped up on the front page of the Guardian website today (UK edition).

The whole project is clearly a massive violation of WP:NOTPAPER.

Lol, the Guardian comments are funny, two shills, and everyone else saying, WTF is wrong with these morons?

[enwikibadscience]

The printed version, from the print-wikipedia-on-demand folks, has this cover for the Columbine shooting "book." (From Guardian posts.)

I love info by 12-year-olds.

[mac]

They envisage the books fitting on a 10m-long book case, which they would hope to display at the Wikimania conference in London this August, alongside "live updates [printed] on continuous paper" to show the update frequency of the website, as "obviously a printed Wikipedia will be outdated within seconds".

That seems plausible. Perhaps they should apply for a £30,000 "Macrogrant" from WMUK.

[edited]

[Mancunium]

They envisage the books fitting on a 10m-long book case, which they would hope to display at the Wikimania conference in London this August, alongside "live updates [printed] on continuous paper" to show the update frequency of the website, as "obviously a printed Wikipedia will be outdated within seconds".

That seems plausible. Perhaps they should apply for a £30,000 "Macrogrant" from WMUK.

Or the WMF could just pay for it out of their slush fund. The panhandling isn't going so well, even though Google News has now aggregated 27 articles on this potential bonfire of the stupidities. This is one of those articles:

Wikipedia Is Being Turned Into a 1,000-Volume Book Set So Can We Use It For Homework Now?
Betabeat, 20 February 2014 link

Are you one of those annoying, self-righteous people who hates reading things on screens because you “just love the weight of a book in your hand and the smell of the pages”? If so, we have good news: some people are trying to crowdfund a project to print all of Wikipedia into a 1,000-volume book set. [...] That seems like a good use of time. And trees. [...] You know, we really do owe a thank-you to the volunteers who inserted a paragraph on anal sex into the article on Rome our dad was innocently trying to read to us on a plane ride when we were 15. [...] “To later generations this might be a period piece from the beginning of the digital revolution,” the campaign page says. Or just an immortal testament to how lazy we all were when it came to doing any real research. So far, the campaign has almost reached the $3,000 mark, and there are 50 days to go. The exhibition is set to take place this August, so make sure you get all your filthy fake corrections in by then.

[Mancunium]

Now there are at least a hundred stories in Google News about this horrific case of Gigantism (T-H-L). Or is it Elephantiasis (T-H-L)?

A Team of Developers Wants to Print Out Wikipedia—All 1,000 Books Of It
Smithsonian, 21 February 2014 link

Wikipedia's ascendance has been a pain for other encyclopedias. Its open source system and staggering size make it difficult for others to keep up, and two years ago—after 244 years in print—the Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing out its tomes (32 volumes, at last count) of knowledge. [...] A hard copy of Wikipedia would be a testament not only to the encyclopedia itself, but to the new enterprise of open, collaborative efforts that have grown with the internet. And, it would be nice to have a backup in case someone one day takes a digital torch to today's Library of Alexandria.

[Mancunium]

Printing Wikipedia Would Take 1 Million Pages, But That's Sort Of The Point
NPR, 30 March 2014 link

A German-based group called PediaPress is trying to raise enough money to make a print copy of all of Wikipedia. That's right, Wikipedia, the ever-evolving, always-changing, inherently digital encyclopedia of information gathered by contributors all over the world. To say this would be a massive project is an understatement. One thousand volumes, 1,200 pages each — more than one million pages in all — about 80 meters of shelf space. That's what it would take to make a printed version of Wikipedia. The idea is to let people see just how much information is in the online encyclopedia, says Christoph Kepper and his partners at Pediapress. [...] Kepper and his partners are trying raise $50,000 through an Indiegogo campaign. Their plan is to exhibit the book at a Wikimania conference in London in August. "We basically thought, OK, let's put up a big bookshelf and put the books into it and let as many people as possible access this shelf and interact with it and get a feeling of about how large it is for themselves," Kepper explains. [...]

"This is not an idea I think is good," says Lee Matthew, a blogger for geek.com. He thinks a printed Wikipedia is unnecessary — a waste of paper and other valuable resources. "I understand from an artistic standpoint what they are trying to show," Matthew says. "I think, though, that the beauty of what Wikipedia is gets lost when you try and print it. ... Trying to put something like Wikipedia that is constantly evolving into a print form doesn't work for me."

Pediapress is sensitive to the criticism that a printed Wikipedia would use a lot of paper. In fact, they plan to plant trees to make up for the paper they use. That makes Jordyn Taylor, who writes for BetaBeat, feel a lot better about the project. “There's no way to go back and look at the history of the Internet. And I am imagining us teaching kids in the future about the history of the Internet and how are we going to go back and show them what it looked like in the 1990s and the 2000s? "I totally get it," Taylor says. "I totally get where they are coming from because you know, when we look back at media history we can look at old books, we can look at old newspapers, old magazines. But there's no way to go back and look at the history of the Internet. [...]

The partners at PediaPress say they do think of this as a period piece. After it is shown at next summer's conference they would love to find a more permanent home for it. Matthew Winner, a blogger and elementary school librarian, has some ideas. "This is public knowledge, so putting it somewhere on display where the public can access it — New York public library or something like that — where everyone has access to it, the Library of Congress. ... I think that's a wonderful idea," Winner says. "We have the user data of how many people are accessing and interacting with Wikipedia online now. It'll be fun to see how many people are coming to see that print resource. And that is something we'll only know after it's printed."

The audio of this discussion, among people who apparently have never been inside a library (the "average" American library has about 10,000 books link), is embedded.

[Stierlitz]

Wikipedia has finally hit Pure Derp.

[Mancunium]

Wikipedia has finally hit Pure Derp.

Sticking their 1000 magical books into the British Library or the Library of Congress, both of which have over 150 million items, or the New York Public Library, which has more than 53 million (List_of_largest_libraries (T-H-L)), would just highlight the laughable ludicrousness of Wikipedia's progress to date in assembling "the sum total of all human knowledge".

[Poetlister]

Wikipedia has finally hit Pure Derp.

Sticking their 1000 magical books into the British Library or the Library of Congress, both of which have over 150 million items, or the New York Public Library, which has more than 53 million (List_of_largest_libraries (T-H-L)), would just highlight the laughable ludicrousness of Wikipedia's progress to date in assembling "the sum total of all human knowledge".

A large library would also include novels, plays and so on which would go on Wikisource rather than Wikipedia. How large is Wikisource in total? Probably a very small fraction of what ideally it ought to be.

[EricBarbour]

I forgot to comment on this before:

PediaPress had its "day in the sun" a long time ago. As you can see from the archives of their blog and their pathetic little abandoned Wikipedia article, there has been little activity since 2010. I suspect this "project" is a last-ditch attempt to keep them from folding.

Also, did you know that one of the Wikipedians they hired, back in their 2009 peak time, was none other than Gaetan "Headbomb" Landry? One of the worst trolls I've ever seen. He underwent three failed RFAs, because he's a total bastard. They also hired Delphine Ménard, of Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France and a former WMF employee. I see no evidence that these people have done much of anything for PediaPress.

[Johnny Au]

Wikipedia has finally hit Pure Derp.

Sticking their 1000 magical books into the British Library or the Library of Congress, both of which have over 150 million items, or the New York Public Library, which has more than 53 million (List_of_largest_libraries (T-H-L)), would just highlight the laughable ludicrousness of Wikipedia's progress to date in assembling "the sum total of all human knowledge".

A large library would also include novels, plays and so on which would go on Wikisource rather than Wikipedia. How large is Wikisource in total? Probably a very small fraction of what ideally it ought to be.

The physical libraries have many multiple copies of the same items.

[Kelly Martin]

The physical libraries have many multiple copies of the same items.

Only for highly demanded works. Libraries only buy multiple copies of a work when either they anticipate it will be heavily demanded or when circulation statistics indicate that it is, in fact, highly demanded. Generally speaking you have a limited acquisitions budget and you'd rather spend it on as diverse a selection of books as you can, so you only buy multiple copies when doing so is necessary to fulfill the needs of your patrons. For public lending libraries, that often means buying multiple copies of popular bestsellers, but most public libraries end up either selling off or dumping all but one or two copies of those books once the borrowing demand for the book drops off. I routinely see last decade's bestsellers languishing on the "book sale" rack at my local public library because they've been pulled from circulation for lack of patron interest.

[thekohser]

Maybe Johnny meant the aggregation of various libraries will have many duplicate issues of the same text, taken together. That is, Mein Kampf might be found in the library at Harvard, and at Yale, and at Michigan State, and at the Corvallis-Benton County Library.

[Stierlitz]

Maybe Johnny meant the aggregation of various libraries will have many duplicate issues of the same text, taken together. That is, Mein Kampf might be found in the library at Harvard, and at Yale, and at Michigan State, and at the Corvallis-Benton County Library.

....And that doesn't begin to take into account the various translations of the little Austrian sheisskopf's masterpiece: the Ralph Mannheim for Houghton Mifflin, the official Nazi translation by James Murphy, the Senator Alan Cranston abridgement, the Reynal and Hitchcock British version, the one William Soskin did for Stackpole and Sons (they went to trial over it), and the 1931 Edgar Dugdale abridgement. On average, if an American library has a copy of Mein Kampf on file it will be the Ralph Mannheim version, but I would guess the more well-heeled colleges might have some of the others in special collections because most of the versions listed date back to the 1930s or `40s, though the Murphy edition has only been released since 2008. One book has many lives.

[Mancunium]

Wikipedia has finally hit Pure Derp.

Sticking their 1000 magical books into the British Library or the Library of Congress, both of which have over 150 million items, or the New York Public Library, which has more than 53 million (List_of_largest_libraries (T-H-L)), would just highlight the laughable ludicrousness of Wikipedia's progress to date in assembling "the sum total of all human knowledge".

A large library would also include novels, plays and so on which would go on Wikisource rather than Wikipedia. How large is Wikisource in total? Probably a very small fraction of what ideally it ought to be.

The physical libraries have many multiple copies of the same items.

True. If the collections of the libraries mentioned had 100 copies of every item, both the Library of Congress and the British Library would have only 1,500,000 unique items, and the New York Public Library would have a mere 530,000: still enough, I think, to demonstrate the puniness of the 1000-volume Sum Of All Knowledge.

Printing Wikipedia and wasting time
Rocky Mountain Collegian, 31 March 2014 link

A Germany-based group called PediaPress is trying to raise enough money to print all of Wikipedia. They are looking to show, in tangible terms, how Wiki has grown, and all of the information that it encompasses. But here's the thing: we know the power of Wikipedia. [...] So why kill trees to show the world in print? Why bother with the time, effort and money that it would take to show people something that they know already? Let’s face it – we have seen the Wikipedia pages that are useless. People think it would be hilarious to make one for themselves, or do so on a drunk dare, but are we really going to take the time to print those out as well? [...] Don't waste the time and leave the online encyclopedia where it belongs - behind our computer screens.

[Poetlister]

I'm not sure where this thread is going. Wikipedia is vastly bigger than any other reference work - never mind the quality, you can't contest the quantity. On the other hand, it doesn't claim to be anywhere near finished. Very many articles are still stubs, and it's easy enough to find more articles to add. If it were claiming to be 90% complete, we could laugh at the pretension.

[Mancunium]

Why on Earth Would We Ever Need a Thousand-Volume Print Copy of Wikipedia?
Bustle, 2 April 2014 link

What would you do if I told you that there’s a group of people who are trying to produce a print copy of Wikipedia? Because it’s happening right now, and they want your help to get it done. To which I can say only this:



A team of developers who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia are currently hosting a campaign on IndieGoGo geared towards producing the world’s first (and probably only) print copy of Wikipedia. [...] The goal is to take it on tour so as to “allow everyone to explore the physical dimensions of Wikipedia,” which is all well and good—I’m sure it’s mind-blowing—but I still can’t help but think it’s one of the worst ideas ever.



There are a couple of reasons why I feel this way. [...][One] Learning new things is one of the best parts of life; making the biggest and most accessible representation of that fact a fixed point diminishes it. After all, a lot happens on the Internet in a day, doesn't it? Two, I worry about what sort of impact a print copy will have on the future academics of the world. Anyone can write it, which is awesome — but it’s also not awesome, because that means that it’s often incorrect (and full of terrible writing, to boot). [...] Speaking as a former writing tutor:



[...]

[TungstenCarbide]

Fucking morons.

This is is how Wikipedia could be put into print while improving the project; start a magazine along the lines of National Geographic or the Smithsonian. Publish an issue each time there are enough new Featured Articles and Featured media to populate it. Figure out a way to pay the authors something. It would be a form of quality control by virtue of a frozen, vetted revision. It would pay for itself. It would attract new authors. It would create whole new game at Wikipedia with people competing to create quality content and to be published. It would move forward the vetting, quality and editing practices of the place. It's one of a thousand things the WMF should have been working on five years ago to spur improvements, instead of sitting on their asses, watching editor statistics decline.

[Mancunium]

Fucking morons.

This is is how Wikipedia could be put into print while improving the project; start a magazine along the lines of National Geographic or the Smithsonian. Publish an issue each time there are enough new Featured Articles and Featured media to populate it. Figure out a way to pay the authors something. It would be a form of quality control by virtue of a frozen, vetted revision. It would pay for itself. It would attract new authors. It would create whole new game at Wikipedia with people competing to create quality content and to be published. It would move forward the vetting, quality and editing practices of the place. It's one of a thousand things the WMF should have been working on five years ago to spur improvements, instead of sitting on their asses, watching editor statistics decline.

This is an excellent idea.

Publisher aims to put all 4 million Wikipedia articles into print
Los Angeles Times, 2 April 2014 link

For some people, Wikipedia is the answer to everything. The always-growing, crowd-sourced encyclopedia is a source of knowledge and trivia used by undergraduates, assorted professional writers and people trying to settle dinner-table arguments about television shows and vaguely remembered news events. Now a German-based publisher, PediaPress, wants to take that virtual encyclopedia and put all of its articles into print -- in one massive, 1,000-volume set of hardcover books of 1,200 pages each. [...] To complete the project, PediaPress is trying to raise $50,000 on Indiegogo by April 11. In seven weeks it has raised a quarter of that, about $12,500. Wikipedia is at once all-encompassing and notoriously unreliable. This writer once spotted an entry that had him born in the wrong country, and professors and college counselors routinely tell their students not to rely on Wikipedia entries in their coursework. Clearly, a $50,000 budget can’t cover fact-checking 4 million articles. [...]

Fact-checking? Wikipedia has never heard of it.

[Mancunium]

TwoSides Supports PediaPress Project Aiming to Print Wikipedia as Encyclopedia Set
What They Think, 4 April 2014 link

Press release from the issuing company

When I heard about a project to take all the current Wikipedia content and produce a multi-volume printed encyclopaedia, I was immediately attracted to the idea. A great way to demonstrate that, although the information age is largely digital, there is no better way to record for posterity the world's knowledge than in an attractive and long lasting format; print on paper! A unique 1000 volume production, with only one copy! [...] If you are interested contact Sonya at sks@twosides.info and we will put you in touch directly with the project team.

Two Sides is apparently a site devoted to the interests of the lumbering, print, and paper industries.
Two Sides: link

[Thracia]

I noted their total on March 18 was $12,123.

18 days later, it's $12,530.

With just 6 days to go, I hope they're braced for that big late surge.

Or to extend their deadline by about 5 years.

[Mancunium]

Wikipedia has attempted to imagine the Sheer Enormity by providing an illustration of The Sum of All Knowledge, dated 4 April 2014. In this image, the blob at the left represents you-- you puny mortal. The enormity on the right is a representation of Omniscience (T-H-L), and is therefore proof that you have no Freewill (T-H-L).



Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes (T-H-L)

This page displays the current size of the English Wikipedia (without images) in print volumes, per mathematical calculation.

Assumptions and calculations

*This shows 2,625 million words across 4.45 million articles (as of February 2014), implying an average of 590 words per article.
* Same source shows 21.21 GB (=22,923,237,680 bytes) across 2,625 million words, implying 8.08 bytes/word. ASCII uses 1 byte/character which in turn implies 8.08 characters/word. However, this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space is standard, so 6 characters/word will be assumed.
* There are currently 4,489,036 articles, which means 2,648,531,240 words, which means 15,891,187,440 characters.
* 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 = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,333 words, or 2,259.9 articles. (Pictures not included!)
*Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 1,986.4 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 1,926 volumes for WP.

"Where's your Messiah now? Eh?"

[Johnny Au]

Wikipedia has attempted to imagine the Sheer Enormity by providing an illustration of The Sum of All Knowledge, dated 4 April 2014. In this image, the blob at the left represents you-- you puny mortal. The enormity on the right is a representation of Omniscience (T-H-L), and is therefore proof that you have no Freewill (T-H-L).



Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes (T-H-L)

This page displays the current size of the English Wikipedia (without images) in print volumes, per mathematical calculation.

Assumptions and calculations

*This shows 2,625 million words across 4.45 million articles (as of February 2014), implying an average of 590 words per article.
* Same source shows 21.21 GB (=22,923,237,680 bytes) across 2,625 million words, implying 8.08 bytes/word. ASCII uses 1 byte/character which in turn implies 8.08 characters/word. However, this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space is standard, so 6 characters/word will be assumed.
* There are currently 4,489,036 articles, which means 2,648,531,240 words, which means 15,891,187,440 characters.
* 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 = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,333 words, or 2,259.9 articles. (Pictures not included!)
*Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 1,986.4 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 1,926 volumes for WP.

"Where's your Messiah now? Eh?"

Excluding multimedia (including images), the entire English Wikipedia can fit inside a standard Blu-Ray disc, with around 3.79 GB to spare (which can probably be used to make a fancy menu screen).