In the summer of 2015 American artist, programmer, designer and educator
Michael Mandiberg arranged to have printed out and bound 106 volumes of the English Wikipedia as it existed on April 7, 2015, as an art project called
Print Wikipedia. According to the Wikipedia article on this topic, the 106 volumes, each incorporating 700 pages, represented a small fraction of 7,473 volumes that would have been necessary to print the online encyclopedia's complete text on that date. The 106 printed books and 2000 other volumes, represented as fake spines on the wall, were exhibited at the Denny Gallery in New York City after the books were completed on July 12, 2015.
"The task took three years, and the upload process took 24 days, 3 hours and 18 minutes. It was completed on 12 July 2015.
[8] PediaPress had attempted to raise money for a full English Wikipedia printout on
Indiegogo in 2014, with a goal of $50,000 (£30,000), but the project was pulled.
[9] The abandoned project had intended to print 1,000 volumes, of 1,200 pages each: a total of 1,200,000 pages, roughly equal 80 meters of shelf space.
[10] Mandiberg later assured people that they would not be printing out the entire collection, claiming that an entire collection is not necessary for people to comprehend the true size of Wikipedia, and, once people have seen a portion of it, it will help them realize its size.
[11] Mandiberg estimates that the printing costs of a full printout would be around $500,000. The Denny art exhibit featured only a selection of actual printed volumes with about 2,000 of the other volumes represented as spines on the wall. The show revolved around the actual upload of the print files to Lulu.com" (Wikipedia article on Print Wikipedia, accessed 12-2021).
Jeremy Norman’s
