Printing Wikipedia Updates

Key Questions and Points

• Suzanne's question: How many printers would you need to keep up with changes to the live version of English Wikipedia?
• Answer: About six printers.
• **Prior Explorations: **
• Rob Matthews (2012): Printed every featured article, resulting in a book a couple of feet thick.
• Michael Mberg (2015): Printed around 1% of Wikipedia's articles, with no images.
• Tom PW: Managed a Wikipedia page calculating the current size of English Wikipedia in printed volumes.
• Edits Statistics:
• English Wikipedia receives ~150,000 edits daily (100 edits/minute).
• Estimation: Each change requires reprinting a page (some edits are reverts, balancing out multi-page edits).

Printing Capacity

• Printer Output:
• Good inkjet printer: 15 pages per minute.
• 100 edits/minute ÷ 15 pages/minute = ~6 printers needed.

Costs and Logistics

• Keeping Up with Edits:
• 300 cubic meters/month of paper if printing all edits.
• Continuous operation of six printers.
• Operating Costs:
• Electricity: A few dollars/day.
• Paper: ~$0.01/sheet, totalling $1,000/day.
• Staff: 24/7 operation requires hired help or volunteers.
• Ink Cartridges:
• Inkjet: $0.05/page (black) to $0.10/page (color).
• Cost: ~$10,000/day for 150,000 daily page edits.
• Laser printers recommended to reduce costs.

Conclusion and Caveats

• High cost and logistics make the project impractical.
• Estimated expenses could reach half a million dollars in a few months.
• Analog solution infeasible, stick to digital.
• Protest scenario: Highlighted issue of changing content to match Wikipedia's updates.

Fun Fact

• Printing Wikipedia for protest would require coloring pages black – impractical and inefficient.