How much paper will such a task require?

A guy called Nikola Smolenski did the calculation as below:

Size of English Wikipedia in October 2006. Today, it is around 70% larger. Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 leaves), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has 4.4GB of text (October 2006) ≈ 750 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn’t include images, tables, templates etc. which probably take up more surface than the text which describes them.

Read more about it HERE.

750 volumes is just 30% of Wikipedia as of now and the size of Wikipedia is still constantly growing by the seconds. In addition, images and hyperlinks are not taken into consideration in this calculation.

Amazing how fast technology has advanced.

I still remember those clumsy thick-set volumes of encyclopedias lying around the house when I was in Secondary School.

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