Usage[edit]

To insert this chart, use the text ((User:Tompw/bookshelf))

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

As of 1 June 2024, Special:Statistics showed 4,625,033,481 words across 6,829,792 articles implying an average of 677 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 6,836,250 articles, which means 4.6294401375×10^⁹ words, which means 2.7776640825×10^¹⁰ 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 1,968.9 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 3,472.1 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
- In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 108.5 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.

Source: User:Tompw/bookshelf/mathematics (no longer updated as of 2015)

10 volumes

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