User:Tompw/bookshelf/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 7,017,765 articles, which means 4.92920795835×10^⁹ words, which means 4.92920795835×10^⁹ 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 3,696.9 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
  • In other words, Wikipedia is approximately 115.53 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica and that's excluding pictures for Wikipedia.
  • The total size would be 9.24m³. 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.