New York Artist Creates a Print Edition of Wikipedia with about 7,600 Volumes

For those of you who are living under a rock and have no idea what Wikipedia is, it is actually a "free, open content online encyclopedia" - as defined in their website. Just like traditional encyclopedias, the Wikipedia also contains a vast collection of information that is readily available for public use. The main difference is that Wikipedia is created through a collaborative effort of a community of users online - meaning they can post and edit the information of a certain topic directly on the website. With this format, more topics can be easily covered by the said website.

Now, an artist in New York is on a very ambitious mission to create a print version of Wikipedia. The website currently has 4,898,089 articles and counting available in the English Wikipedia alone (total Wiki pages at 36, 546, 525 with 21.25 average revisions). The printed version will come with 7,600 volumes priced at $500,000.

The brain child behind this project is Michael Mandiberg, an artist and a professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. Together with his assistant, Jonathan Kiritharan, they have developed a software that parses the entirety of the English Wikipedia database and programs it into 7,600 volumes complete with covers, which is then uploaded to the print-on-demand site Lulu.com.

There will be an exhibition in New York's East Village that will show the entire 11GB compressed file to be uploaded in the website. It is said that the estimate completion of upload will take about 11 to 14 days. After which, the whole set will be available for sale at $500,000 while individual volumes to be purchased at $80.

Denny's Gallery, where the exhibition will be held, will showcase the encyclopedia by lining its walls with wallpaper showing the spines of the first 1,980 volumes in the set together with 106 physical volumes containing about 700 pages each. 

It was reported that the first entry of the encyclopedia will be the 91-volume table of listing almost 11.5 million articles. 

Watch the video below to learn more about the printed Wikipedia project: