Photo by ron dyar on Unsplash

There have been several attempts to quantify Wikipedia in print, but few have taken actual steps to complete the task. The lastest such effort comes in the form of an art gallery – From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! – created by Michael Mandiberg, and showcased last week in New York.

An interdisciplinary artist, Mandiberg has been trying to tackle this daunting task since 2009. After finally crunching the numbers, Mandiberg enlisted the help of Lulu.com last fall for the print job. After a few raised eyebrows, the publishing company gave Mandiberg a final assessment: 7,600 volumes, each book counting 700 pages (350 individual sheets of paper), for a total of 2.660.000 leafs to turn. And that was before millions of new edits had been added to the encyclopedia.

$500,000 for the whole set

Mandiberg decided to exhibit a portion of the library at New York’s Denny Gallery last week. He knew couldn’t fit 7,600 hardovers through the door, so he ended up treating visitors to a visual representation (a wallpaper) showing what would be about 2,000 volumes hanging on shelves. Only 106 physical volumes were actually produced for those looking to get a feel of the actual product.

As Mandiberg creator tells the NY Times, “We don’t need to see the whole thing in order to understand how big it is. Even if we just have one bookshelf, our human brains can finish the rest.”

While the 7,600-book set won’t be manufactured anytime soon, Mandiberg does take orders for individual binders. You can have one tome for $80. The entire encyclopedia would come in at $500,000, with a hefty $100,000 discount for the bulk order.

7.6 metric tonnes of knowledge

To give you a sense of how much of Wikipedia is non-knowledge, 91 volumes are solely taken up by the table of contents, which lists the 11.5 million articles currently comprising the free knowledge bible. Three dozen others are dedicated to the contributors index, which lists 7.5 million names. That’s 127 volumes, or 88.900 pages exclusivelly filled with references and credits. An additional 500 books are said to contain entries beginning with special characters and punctuation marks.

I used the book-weight calculator over at lugaru.com to make a rough approximation of how much the entire Wikipedia library would weigh, were it entirely produced. The answer: 7.6 metric tonnes of knowledge.