this question comes from Suzanne who asks if you had a printed version of the whole of Wikipedia how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version for the English Wikipedia you'd need this many six printers is surprisingly few but before you try to create a live updating paper version of Wikipedia let's look at what those printers would be doing and how much they'd cost people have considered printing out Wikipedia before in 2012 Rob Matthews printed every featured article creating a book a couple feet thick and in 2015 Michael mberg created art installation to show the scope of Wikipedia by printing around 1% of its articles although without images the entire encyclopedia would be a lot bigger Wikipedia user Tom PW has set up a Wikipedia page that calculates the current size of the whole English Wikipedia without images in printed volumes it would currently fill a lot of bookshelves but most libraries have far more books keeping up with the edits would be harder English Wikipedia currently receives about 150,000 edits each day or 100 per minute we could try to define a way to measure the word count of the average edit but that's hard bordering on Impossible and fortunately we don't need to we can just estimate that each change is going to require us to reprint a page somewhere now many edits will actually change multiple pages but many other edits are reverts which would let us put back pages that we've already printed so one page per edit seems like a reasonable middle ground for a mix of photos tables and text typical of Wikipedia a good injet printer might put out 15 pages per minute this means you'd only need about six printers running at any given time to keep Pace with the roughly 100 edits each minute the paper would stack up quickly using Rob matthews's book as a starting point I did my own back of the envelope at estimate for the size of the current English Wikipedia and based on the average length of featured articles versus all articles I came up with an estimate of 300 cubic M for a print out of the whole thing by comparison if you were trying to keep up with the edits you'd be printing out 300 cubic met every month six printers isn't that many but they'd be running all the time and that gets expensive the electricity to run them would be cheap a few dollars a day the paper would be about 1 cent per sheet which means you'd be spending about $1,000 a day you'd want to hire people to manage the printers 24/7 so depending on wages in your area this could cost less on the paper or much less if you can figure out a way to trick Wikipedia's volunteer editors into helping you even the printers themselves wouldn't be too expensive despite the terrifyingly fast replacement cycle but the ink cartridges would be a nightmare various sources estimate that for a typical inkjet printer the real life cost of ink runs from 5 cents a page for black and white to around 10 cents a page for color with 150,000 daily page edits that means you'd be spending about $10,000 per day on ink cartridges so you definitely want to invest in a laser printer otherwise in just a month or two this project could end up costing you half a million dollars but that's not even the worst part if someday Wikipedia decides to go dark again like they did in 2012 and you want to join the protest you're going to have to get a giant creative markers so you can color every page solid black I would definitely stick to digital