
Wikipedia: Size in volumes - dpcx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
======
tty
Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia

[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipe...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipedias_ordered_by_number_of_articles)

Take a look at the "depth" column. Dutch and Swedish used to be your average
Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that
it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots
to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled
from other language Wikipedias). It usually becomes more extreme when there's
some sort of milestone ahead. There's even worse offenders, for example Waray-
Waray.

I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all
such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit
of an encyclopedia.

~~~
simias
What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a
stupid race to be "on top"?

~~~
blowski
Once the article is created, it can appear in Google. Once it's in Google,
it's more likely to have visitors and some of them might improve the article.

I have no idea whether this was the rationale or even whether it's a good
idea, but there might be more to their strategy than article count.

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ziko
Sometimes when you look at similar graphics to this one, you go: "Wow, that's
big."

Somehow, this wasn't one of those times. This one was:
[http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...](http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_greek.html)

~~~
dlhavema
That is a really cool link, i especially like the page about gold.. crazy so
much ( ~50% ) of the worlds gold is in jewelry..

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ZeroMinx
Latest what-if is relevant here;

Updating a Printed Wikipedia - [http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/](http://what-
if.xkcd.com/59/)

~~~
agumonkey
What's scaring me is to imagine how many offices do run many printers
continuously. And I thought investing in good LCD / software was expensive ..

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dsschnau
That's actually.. smaller than I would have thought.

~~~
M2Ys4U
Well it completely ignores formatting (lists, tables, headings etc.) and
images, so if you were to account for those it would inflate a fair bit I
would imagine.

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svag
I believe the importance of Wikipedia is not so of how big it is, but how
easily it's accessible (with no cost) and that the articles can be updated and
be available almost instantly (in comparison with a hard copy encyclopedia).

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ck2
Can we do measurements in "library of congresses" yet?

It used to be a joke but if you can compare like this, you should be able to
do a rough estimate of LoC ?

~~~
Dylan16807
According to Wikipedia, the physical holdings of the Library of Congress total
33 million distinct books worth about 15 terabytes.

So quite a way to go from ~2k volumes.

~~~
yor
It would be more useful to compare the LoC with the combined text, graphics,
and other applicable media of every Wikimedia site.

~~~
Dylan16807
I feel like the text is the most important part for an encyclopedia. Some
images are needed, but not a huge number.

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rwg
It seems strange to estimate when you could download Wikipedia's database
dump, reformat the content in the same style as the Encyclopedia Britannica,
and count how many pages/volumes you end up with.

~~~
ams6110
I think it's strange (as in, unexpected) that the entirety of Wikipedia could
fit on a set of shelves in one row at an average library. I would have thought
it would be larger than that.

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Houshalter
I downloaded the entire English Wikipedia for offline use. There is some
software available to render it, but it doesn't do images or a lot of the
formatting. However it's still readable and when the internet is down, it's
useful to have.

~~~
BrandonMarc
How big is it, in terms of file size?

~~~
harshreality
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-
language_Wikipedia)

 _pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages.
(This is probably the one you want. The size of the 4 April 2013 dump is
approximately 9.06 GB compressed, 42 GB uncompressed)_

bzip can be decompressed in chunks, can't it? I wonder if there's an app to
read a compressed wikipedia xml archive on an ios or android tablet. Even
better would be if it fetches missing resources (like embedded images) from
the real wikipedia if there's internet access.

~~~
Houshalter
There seems to be a few
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App)
.

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buro9
Ah, but that's answering quantitatively and most people would probably want
any value question answered qualitatively.

