Wikipedia may become million-page book
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The reading
A publishing company plans to print all of the articles from the Wikipedia website. PediaPress hopes to print the entire contents of Wikipedia in 1,000 books, each containing 1,200 pages. Wikipedia has over 4.3 million articles and 2.6 billion words. Over 20 million volunteers have helped to write it. The project will see the physical version of Wikipedia on nearly 1.2 million pages of print. The page numbers will continue from book to book and the final page will be number 1,193,014. PediaPress needs $50,000 to start the project. It wants people to donate money so it can go ahead with the first copy. The company has already printed number one of the thousand books. It includes the articles from "A" to "A76 motorway".
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Many people are questioning why PediaPress wants to print out such a huge website. They say it will be out of date as soon as it starts printing. A spokesperson from PediaPress said the company wants to show the world just how big Wikipedia really is. He said: "We think that the best way to experience the size of Wikipedia is by transforming it into the physical medium of books." He added: "Containing the most volumes and edited by the largest number of contributors, the printed edition will be a work of record-breaking dimensions." The company may take the books on a world tour. After that, it will donate them to a big public library.
Sources:
- http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/printing-all-wikipedia-1-000-books-its-not-joke-n33916
- http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/pediapress-wants-to-print-the-complete-english-wikipedia-in-1000-books/
- http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/18/the-wikipedia-books-project
