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How big do you think wikipedia is in size by volumes?

July 29th, 2009 Author: Thai Categories: Internet
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wikipedia-bookIt’s no big secret I’m a big fan of wikipedia. Not only is it free which in my book is the number one reason, but also it is truly an example of a great equalizer that the founders of the ‘new’ internet had hope to foster. Where else on earth or at any time in our civilization is the near sum total of our knowledge this freely available for the most humble of souls to leaders of superpowers. Each passing year sees this collection of knowledge grow in leaps and bounds. It is also a very democratic way of presenting the information. What becomes commonly excepted memes become embedded in the article as genuine facts. This is sometimes its’ downfall as anyone but specifically enough people with the wrong knowledge can pass that information to wikipedia as facts.


Below is that current stats for the collection:

- Nearly 3 million articles with about 8 billion characters
- Nearly 1000 volumes of wikipedia if printed in book form with one volume equaling 8 million characters.

That would be a lot of books for that poor sales person to haul around door to door. Especially if it comes in different colors.

I’ve been guilty of searching on wikipedia every time I am stumped or curious about something. It’s become an obsession of mine to go from one link to the next in each article to the point where I may start off looking for ways to keep my front yard tree alive to end up reading about the genocide in Rwandan.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

  1. resource magazine
    March 25th, 2010 at 02:23 | #1
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    Installation process is required: simply download the zip file, extract the contents to a convenient directory (e.g. c:program filesdrumlinlite) and run the drumlinlite.exe program. You can create a shortcut and drag this to your desktop for a quick link to the program.

  2. golf improvement plan
    April 5th, 2010 at 23:34 | #2
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    The inclusion limits are most commonly reached on pages that use the same template many times, for example using one transclusion per row of a long table. Even though the amount of data that the template adds to the final page may be small, it is counted each time the template is used, and so the limit may be encountered sooner than expected. Pages that only include a few dozen templates are unlikely to exceed the inclusion limits, unless these templates themselves include a lot of data.

  3. tous handbag
    April 7th, 2010 at 08:13 | #3
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    Hi very great sharing i don’t know what type of book ha ha ha.

  4. white board
    May 11th, 2010 at 21:28 | #4
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    This is interesting, but the numbers don’t add up. If that book was really 0.01% of the total, that means it would take 10,000 such volumes for the whole thing, and that book is way bigger than one volume of Brittanica (probably more like ten volumes, so that would mean 100,000 Brittanica volumes total). Yet the story says it would equal just 952 Brittanica volumes. So, one of those numbers is way off.

  5. Phone Shack
    July 10th, 2010 at 20:26 | #5
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    Hi very excellent sharing i don’t know what variety of book ha ha ha.

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