
How big Wikipedia would be if published as as printed volumes - pg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wikipedia.svg
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leoc
It's a few times bigger than the ODNB, but not really on a wholly different
scale: <http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/print/> . (The sample page is at
<http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/print/psample/> .)

The introduction to the ODNB at
<http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/prelims/intro> gives some other useful
points of comparison. (Roughly: 50,000 articles, 10,000 contributors, GBP26
million, and 12 years (1992-2004), not counting the work on the old DNB or the
post-2004 material for the new.)

So, by the enormously suspect calculation of applying the ODNB's cost per word
to en.wikipedia's wordcount, it seems that you could create such an
encyclopedia, to the highest academic standards, for the cost of about two
small Alaskan bridges.

~~~
leoc
(news.yc automatically munges the pound symbol into 'GBP'?)

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djonesx
This is awesome...

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wiki...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_broken_down.png)

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trekker7
Seems really small, actually. I guess the site has a ways to go before it
contains the sum total of all human knowledge, if that is the goal. But
Wikipedia already kicks ass.

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aswanson
Only 4.4 gb as uncompressed text.

