What if you tried to print Wikipedia?

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?

Credits
*******
Randall Munroe | Narrator
Henry Reich | Writer & Director
Lizah van der Aart | Illustration and Video Editing
Ever Salazar | Chief Chaos Controller
Know Art Studios | Music & Sound Effects

What If? The Video Series is the official adaptation of the What If? books by Randall Munroe and is produced by Neptune Studios LLC.

Henry Reich is the creator of MinutePhysics and executive producer of MinuteEarth and MinuteFood and founder of Neptune Studios LLC (the parent company for all three youtube channels).

©2024 xkcd, inc.

[Jish]

The only one of these videos where everybody doesn't die

[allanolley]

If Wikipedia goes black just turn off the lights in the room where the print outs are stored. The pages will now be all be black to the human eye.

[Zorro]

Printing out every page of Wikipedia only to sharpie every single one sounds like a less efficient Fahrenheit 451.

[PrismPoint]

I literally just saw a post about Wikipedia's protocol for a societal collapse/Extinction event where moderators are instructed to print out as many articles as they can.

[StupidEdits]

This hypothetical really helps you respect monks a whole lot more

[smalltime]

Not entirely related, but when I was a first year CS student at uni, one of the Post-grads decided to abuse their printing allowance and incidentally annoy one of the other grads by printing all the pages of XKCD using the CS student printers and then put them all up in the CS common room.
MFD Printers are surprisingly quick, especially when you're using 5 of them, so they then moved on to printing other things.

[brandonpark]

I love seeing these adaptations of the what-if blogs: when they're animated and voiced, they're much more engaging.

[verdatum]

As a pharmacy tech, it was my job to update the "Drug Facts & Comparisons" book. We'd get a packet every month with all the pages that contained edits, and an instruction sheet of what pages to remove and what pages to add. When I left in 2006, the thing was roughly 5 inches thick, with the ability to become about 8 inches thick.
No clue if that's still maintained. I hope not. It was really dumb in the digital age.

[AndyLundell]

This is one of those rare situations where the longer the print-queue is, the better. It's common for pages to be edited multiple times in quick succession, so if the print queue was an hour long, a huge fraction of the print jobs could just be removed from the queue because they were already out of date.

This brings up a secondary question though. If your optimization algorithm just naively removed out of date pages from the queue, some pages are edited so often that their updated version would never make it to the front of the queue.

You'd probably need an algorithm that decides to let an obsolete edit through the queue every once and a while just so the printed version doesn't fall too far out of date. I'm not sure what the optimum algorithm for that would be.

[z-beeblebrox]

It’s said - by the Hitchhiker’s Guide - that if the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were to be printed out, it would be roughly the size of two large skyscrapers. But if wikipedia alone theoretically takes up 300 cubic meters, even simplifying it down to the phrase “mostly harmless” the two skyscraper guess seems an exceptional underestimation for an entire galaxy’s worth of planet entries!

[magpieMOB]

When I started working at a large teaching hospital, I remember one person during induction giving us the factoid that printer ink was the most costly consumable used on site - including every medication, industrial gas, and imaging isotope - printer ink beat them all (this was to reinforce the significance of unnecessary printing)

[johnsmith]

One things to consider is font size. As a kid before ereaders were affordable I would download ebooks and print it on the school printer which was able to go down to 4pt font.

I would print the books double sided with no margins and I was able to fit entire books on like four to eight pages. I would literally carry around a magnifying glass and use that to read the book that I could carry around in my pocket 😂

[darthdzl]

You had me thinking "why the hell would you EVER go with ink-jet for this?" there for a second, but you rescued it nicely. 😁

[davydatwood]

I used to work in a law library. For a lot of subjects, law textbooks are binders so you can replace the paces when something changes rather than replace the entire book. A big part of my job was doing the actual page replacements. Based on that, I think that this video is seriously underestimating the labour and time costs needed to update the hardcopy of Wikipedia.

[ThatSpecificIndividual]

Imagine printing out all of Wikipedia with no edits and in the future a historian becomes puzzled on how its possible a man called Charlie Sheen could be 'half cocaine'

[bdubbs]

The written word is so beautiful. It was the comment about how even those shelves full of wikipedia's entire content are small in comparison to your *average* library. The sum of just currently accessible, recorded human knowledge and creativity is so vast it's almost incomprehensible

[fireandcopper]

Back in 2011 my teachers would edit the Wikipedia pages that were very specific to our current course when we were 13 or 14 and therefore got the entire site banned on our school's Network. Wikipedia is entirely a reliable source as long as you source your source and use Wikipedia as a reference since it literally lists the source of the information in a large area below the article

[TrogdorElite]

As a former engineer at Ricoh working on commercial continuous feed inkjet printers (roll feed machines printing, there is way more efficient ways to do this. Frankly act print shops that print all the bills and fliers in your mail box could handle a monthly update in an afternoon no problem. We count speed in feet per minute (current model rated at 492 rpm, resulting in approx 1000 sheets per minute).

The big difference is ink. Ink is in 10-20L containers and cost orders of magnitude less than desk top ink.

[tompw]

Slight error at 0:39 - I used a desktop computer, not a laptop. :-)

[ThisFace]

I just wanna say I love the vocalizations of all the sounds. Makes me chuckle every now and then 😂