wikipedia, printed

2,559 of Wikipedia’s best articles are ‘featured articles’.
it’s these that rob matthews decided to press ‘cntrl + p’ on and print out (probably at work). the result is this weighty tome of some 5000 pages.
i believe his piece was to convey that it is only through computers that this amount of information becomes palatable, searchable and essentially useful.

The sheer volume of information stored on Wikipedia is massive. A text based archive of the English version takes up 2.5GB and if you include images, that number jumps to over 78GB.

If you were to print out the whole thing (not just the featured articles), this is what it would look like based on 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.

And this is what it would contain:

rob matthews via manystuff
other images via Wikipedia
NB: this is a copy of my post at spreadingjam.com (because i’m lazy)

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posted: June 7th, 2009 | by: tomagotchi | perma: link | tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

3 Comments on “wikipedia, printed”

  1. #1 imelectric said at 4:22 pm on July 28th, 2009:

    ooh yes i like this so much! haha have also posted this on yay! genius!:)

  2. #2 Green Party said at 2:13 pm on June 20th, 2009:

    lets all print out wikipedia shall we? fuck the trees!

  3. #3 Mya said at 5:54 am on June 10th, 2009:

    Oh my goodness, your blog showcases some amazing artists. I am glad I stumbled onto it.

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