User:Tompw/bookshelf/assumptions
< User:Tompw | bookshelf
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Encyclopaedia_Britannica_15_with_2002.jpg/220px-Encyclopaedia_Britannica_15_with_2002.jpg)
- 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 6,851,487 articles, which means 4.65298185144×10 9 words, which means 2.791789110864×10 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 1,963.3 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 3,489.7 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
- In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 109.05 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
- The total size would be 8.7m3. 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.