0.01% of Wikipedia as a printed book | Hacker News Reader

0.01% of Wikipedia as a printed book

labnol.org

31 pointsdanenania25 comments

Only 5,000 pages? I have books that are over 2,600 pages that don't even break 2.5" (eg Machinery's Handbook). Even using standard 20lb printer paper, my calculations don't have it breaking a foot. They must have used something like card stock, just to add shock value to it.

Seriously though, turning Wikipedia into dead tree media is something that should be taken more seriously. Without much effort, relatively interesting primers on subjects could be put together with relatively little effort. Think "Cryptographic algorithms" or "Battles of WW2" or "Countries of Africa" Collect and curate a selection carefully, and throw it up on some place like lulu.

There are fishy companies that sell print-on-demand "books" based directly on Wikipedia articles, mentioning the source only in small print. I guess most of their customers don't realize that they buy something available for free on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing

Yes, so the collector would definitely need to be creating value-added through the curation process, through the preface, index, which articles are selected, how they're ordered, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_density#Conversions

5000 pages of 20lb paper would be 0.485m tall.

2.5"/2600 = 0.024m, which looks like 4lb paper - seriously thin.

Even easier to visualize: a ream of paper (for example, what you put in your printer) is 500 sheets. So, stack five of those on top of each other, and you have 5000 pages (plus a little extra for the wrappers.

Needless to say, it's nowhere near the tower pictured in the photo.

EDIT: corrected "sheets" for my previous, incorrect "pages", which changed the number of reams to five.

No, but ten of those stacks might be a lot closer. Check your math!

I had ten originally, but then I was reminded that 1 sheet equals two pages (recto and verso). So, 5000 pages = 2500 sheets = 5 reams.

Even ten reams is significantly smaller than the tower pictured, though.

http://www.amazon.com/Merck-Manual-Diagnosis-Therapy-18th/dp...

3000 pages, 2 inches thick.

I like the idea of demonstrating the impressive size of Wikipedia by printing a book. However, the article withholds important base information:

* Which paper format and size has been used? (Letter? A4?)

* How big are the page margins?

* Is it printed one-sided or two-sided?

* Which font and font-size have been used?

* What line-distance has been used? (100%, 150%, ... ?)

* What does the "0.01%" refer to? (to the number of words, or just to the number of articles?)

Without this information, the given facts like "5000 pages" are almost meaningless.

According to http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/ it has 5000 pages, consisting of just the WP featured articles. No example typeset pages are given.

The latest results aren't available yet, but the most recent word count of 6 billion dates from Nov 09. 0.01% of that over 5000 pages would give 120 words per page. Something is missing.

Nor does the "0.01%" refer to the number of articles. The author's website says this is a printout of the (English) "Featured articles" (currently 3235). Neither dividing that by the number of English articles (3.6M) or total articles (18.1M) gives 0.01%.

So I can't see where they got 0.01% from.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/

Although I appreciate your effort, I don't think it makes any sense that we try figure this out on our own.

It's the task of the author, not the readers, to deliver those facts.

Some of the comments at the article site seem to be from the author. One of them says they selected 400 articles from the featured articles and at the time that was 0.013% of all the articles.

This story dates from June 2009, but taking into account the article counts from this date (2.9 million, 13.6 million for English / all respectively) doesn't account for the disparity in numbers.

>"Is it printed one-sided or two-sided?"

From the first photo it appears to be one sided

If you've ever thumbed through the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll know these are all very valid questions. :)

What I like most about Wikipedia is the random reading binges, where you get from History of Lithuania to Glass Onion (Beatles song), stop by at surface-to-air missiles and finish with the Carlsberg brewery.

Perhaps print-on-demand unique pre-made binges "100% guaranteed random subjects" are a business idea? As an alternative to newspapers in train station kiosks?

This. The choose-your-own adventure element to Wikipedia is what makes it so immersive.

Here is a twelve volume set consisting of the entire edit history of the "Iraq War" entry on Wikipedia.

http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

There's an easy way to print from the wikipedia or any wikimedia wiki:

http://pediapress.com/

It's also open source, video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1K03AZfpDM

For a different axis, see also: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

I heard about this back when it was released. IMO a much more interesting reading. I heard the guys behind it have other projects.

That kind of book provides a view on the events never before available. It's a condensed testimonial about a globalized/globalazing society and its many cultures.

He could have separated the book into different volumes and alloted different books for different topics. Would have made his and the reader's life easier

Wow, how short is that guy standing next to it, if the book is only 19 inches high? It comes up to his knees!

"Think of the trees!" -Unless

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