User:Tompw/bookshelf
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| 3868 volumes 20 stacks  |
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Usage
To insert this chart, use the text {{User:Tompw/bookshelf}}
Its main use is on the page Wikipedia:Size in volumes
Assumptions
- As of 1 April 2026, Special:Statistics showed 5,150,836,266 words across 7,162,088 articles implying an average of 719.18 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 7,169,528 articles, which means 5.15618114704×109 words, which means 3.093708688224×1010 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 1,854 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 3,867.1 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
- In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 120.85 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
- The total size would be 9.67m3, assuming that each volume is also 20cm wide, meaning 400 volumes equal a cubic meter. This is substantially less than stated in 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.
Transcluded pages
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/volumes: number of volumes (3868)
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/stacks: number of stacks (20)
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/stack200: a full stack (10 rows; 200 volumes)
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/stack200v: a partially filled stack
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20: a full row (20 volumes)
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20v: a partially-filled row
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/row20e: an empty row
- User:Tompw/bookshelf/assumptions: assumptions (transcluded above)
Maths articles
Source: User:Tompw/bookshelf/mathematics (no longer updated as of 2015)
10 volumes