Pic of the Day: What Wikipedia Looks Like Printed Out

For some reason London-based photographer Rob Matthews decided to print out all 2,559 of Wikipedia’s “featured articles” — which is about 5,000 pages worth of content — and this supersized tome is the end result. So what do you think of the project: Total waste of paper or a useful demonstration of how much information the internet helps us store? More importantly: How much do you think that sucker weighs?

[via Braiker]

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incredible waste of paper. :(

10's of thousands of people authored the book we see in the picture. Is there anything in history like it? Put the book in a museum.

Note that it says "Featured" articles -- this is hardly the full contents of the web site. We can safely assume that the featured articles represent only a small portion of the overall number of entries.

all written with erasable ink

Apparently he doesn't have the same love/hate memories of the Encyclopedia Brittanica guy that I do. Hey Rob, it used to be done in individual alphabetized volumes. Just a tip. May be easier to transport. And way less useless.

5,000 pages? Hasn't anyone seen General Electric's 28,000 page income tax return?

If he would have printed it as a real book, it would have been double sided and half the size. And if he did not use a standard 20LB bond sheet as required by most output devises, but instead used a much thinner sheet as found most telephone books, it would have turned out to be the size of any large unabridged dictionary.

i would have imagined it to be much larger! sort of surprised for some reason that it is not much, much taller

it has no fucking sense. it is not "free", it is not wikipedia...

Ha, nice...the whole English version (not just the featured articles) would take up about 1400+ of those.

Interesting project, but you'd think he'd put more though into the backdrop he photographed it in. That floor looks nasty....

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