A billion and a half words. Can you mentally grasp how big that is?
1.5N GB, where N is the average bytes per English word. Multiply by, say, 5 for the HTML overhead and it would still all fit onto a 64GB memory stick uncompressed, though I’d want something faster for actually accessing it.
It would actually be larger, as you’d need all the images as well, and you’d want the ancillary things like wikisource and wiktionary (I don’t know if those are independent projects or if they’re included in your figure) but even so, it sounds like the whole thing would easily fit onto a typical hard disc.
I have all of the english wikipedia available for offline searching on my phone. It’s big, sure, but it doesn’t fill the memory card by any means (and this is just the default one that came with the phone).
For offline access on a windows computer, WikiTaxi is a reasonable solution.
I’d recommend that everyone who can carry around offline versions of wikipedia. I consider it part of my disaster preparedness, not to mention the fun of learning new things by hitting the ‘random article’ button.
In the context you started out talking about—making a backup—mentally grasping how much data that is as text seems far less relevant than mentally grasping how much data that is as a fraction of the storage capacity of a phone, or grasping it as an amount of time required to transfer it from one network location to another.
It sounds like you’ve switched contexts along the way, though I’m not really sure to what.
It’s roughly as many words as are spoken worldwide in 2.5 seconds, assuming 7450 words per person per day. It’s very probably less than the number of English words spoken in a minute. It’s also about the number of words you can expect to speak in 550 years. That means there might be people alive who’ve spoken that many words, given the variance of word-production counts.
So, a near inconceivable quantity for one person, but a minute fraction of total human communication.
1.5N GB, where N is the average bytes per English word. Multiply by, say, 5 for the HTML overhead and it would still all fit onto a 64GB memory stick uncompressed, though I’d want something faster for actually accessing it.
It would actually be larger, as you’d need all the images as well, and you’d want the ancillary things like wikisource and wiktionary (I don’t know if those are independent projects or if they’re included in your figure) but even so, it sounds like the whole thing would easily fit onto a typical hard disc.
I have all of the english wikipedia available for offline searching on my phone. It’s big, sure, but it doesn’t fill the memory card by any means (and this is just the default one that came with the phone).
For offline access on a windows computer, WikiTaxi is a reasonable solution.
I’d recommend that everyone who can carry around offline versions of wikipedia. I consider it part of my disaster preparedness, not to mention the fun of learning new things by hitting the ‘random article’ button.
No. You or I can say the numbers. But can you mentally grasp how much text that is? I doubt it.
Oh, and English Wikipedia is now being written faster than anyone could possibly read it.
In the context you started out talking about—making a backup—mentally grasping how much data that is as text seems far less relevant than mentally grasping how much data that is as a fraction of the storage capacity of a phone, or grasping it as an amount of time required to transfer it from one network location to another.
It sounds like you’ve switched contexts along the way, though I’m not really sure to what.
Yeah, I went off on a sidetrack of expressing how flabbergasted I am at the size of the thing. Sorry about that.
It’s roughly as many words as are spoken worldwide in 2.5 seconds, assuming 7450 words per person per day. It’s very probably less than the number of English words spoken in a minute. It’s also about the number of words you can expect to speak in 550 years. That means there might be people alive who’ve spoken that many words, given the variance of word-production counts.
So, a near inconceivable quantity for one person, but a minute fraction of total human communication.