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

3360 volumes 17 stacks

• As of 3 July 2023, Special:Statistics showed 4,391,798,880 words across 6,678,098 articles implying an average of 658 words per article.
• As of 2021, 33.997 GB (=33,997,900,893 bytes) across four billion words, implying 8.3 bytes/word. ASCII uses 1 byte/character which in turn implies 8.3 characters/word. However, this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space or punctuation mark is standard, so 6 characters/word will be assumed.
• There are currently 6,811,388 articles, which means 4.47944120432×10^⁹ words, which means 2.687664722592×10^¹⁰ characters.
• One volume: 25cm high, 5cm thick. 500 leaves, 2 pagefaces per leaf, 2 columns per pageface, 80 rows/column, 50 characters per row. So one volume = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,333 words, or 2,027.5 articles. (Pictures not included!)
  • Sanity check: Encyclopædia Britannica has 44 million words across 32 volumes, or 1,375,000 words per volume.
• Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 3,359.6 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
  • In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 104.99 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.

In June 2015, artist Michael Mandiberg (User:Theredproject) generated a 7,473-volume print-ready collection of the English Wikipedia in PDF format, printed wallpaper representing the spines of the books, and printed over 100 volumes through print on demand service Lulu, as part of an art installation at the Denny Gallery in New York City. The table of contents alone took 91 volumes to list the nearly 11.5 million articles.^[1][2]

• "Wikipedia Encyclopedia as a Printed Book". Labno.org. 15 July 2012.
• "What if? Updating a Printed Wikipedia". xkcd. August 2013.