User:Tompw/bookshelf

3714 volumes 19 stacks

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Usage

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Its main use is on the page Wikipedia:Size in volumes

Assumptions

Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th edition: two rows of volumes in shelves

• As of 1 July 2025, Special:Statistics showed 4,928,052,676 words across 7,016,102 articles implying an average of 702 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 7,048,783 articles, which means 4.95099469137×10^⁹ words, which means 4.95099469137×10^⁹ 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 1,898.3 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 3,713.2 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
  • In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 116.04 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
  • The total size would be 9.28m³. 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 (3714)
• User:Tompw/bookshelf/stacks: number of stacks (19)
• 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Source: User:Tompw/bookshelf/mathematics (no longer updated as of 2015)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

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