User:Tompw/bookshelf/assumptions


 * As of 1 July 2024, Special:Statistics showed 4,647,681,621 words across 6,843,725 articles implying an average of 679 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 articles, which means  words, which means  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 = characters, or  words, or  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  volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
 * In other words, Wikipedia is approximately  times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
 * The total size would be m3. This is substantially less than this video, which has 300m3 - but that figure is based on Rob Matthews' artwork Bookifying Wikipedia. Matthews included all featured articles, with images and tables, and unknown text density. Different assumptions, different results.