Height of Wikipedia
The question is very simple and even simpler is the solution to it. I start printing each article of Wikipedia. If I stack these papers on top of each other, how tall will the stack get?
Wikipedia has been written in various languages. English Wikipedia has three billion nine hundred million (3,900,000,000) words. A normal A4 sized Microsoft Word document with twelve size font and default margins will contain four hundred words. Printing all the words will give us a stack of nine million seven hundred fifty thousand (9,750,000) papers. Well that is a lot of paper -- maybe more than the toilet paper kept reserve at an average US home!
Now let us see how high all these paper will reach if we stack them on top of each other. The thickness of common paper is 0.1 millimetre. So the height of the stack of papers will be nine hundred seventy-five (975) metres! That is higher than the world’s tallest skyscraper Burj Khalifa, which has a height of eight hundred twenty-eight (828) metres.
We only printed the English Wikipedia. What if we print the contents of Wikipedia in all languages including English? Phew! The total number of words in the complete Wikipedia in all languages is twenty-nine billion (29,000,000,000). This time the stack will be somewhat seven thousand two hundred fifty (7,250) metres. The mean depth of Earth’s ocean is three thousand six hundred eighty-two (3,682) metres. The height of the stack is around two times the depth of the ocean, which is VERY impressive!
