What if you tried to print Wikipedia?

The only one of these videos where everybody doesn't die

If Wikipedia goes black just turn off the lights in the room where the print outs are stored. The pages will now be all be black to the human eye.

Printing out every page of Wikipedia only to sharpie every single one sounds like a less efficient Fahrenheit 451.

I literally just saw a post about Wikipedia's protocol for a societal collapse/Extinction event where moderators are instructed to print out as many articles as they can.

This hypothetical really helps you respect monks a whole lot more

I love seeing these adaptations of the what-if blogs: when they're animated and voiced, they're much more engaging.

Not entirely related, but when I was a first year CS student at uni, one of the Post-grads decided to abuse their printing allowance and incidentally annoy one of the other grads by printing all the pages of XKCD using the CS student printers and then put them all up in the CS common room. MFD Printers are surprisingly quick, especially when you're using 5 of them, so they then moved on to printing other things.

It’s said - by the Hitchhiker’s Guide - that if the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were to be printed out, it would be roughly the size of two large skyscrapers. But if wikipedia alone theoretically takes up 300 cubic meters, even simplifying it down to the phrase “mostly harmless” the two skyscraper guess seems an exceptional underestimation for an entire galaxy’s worth of planet entries!

One things to consider is font size. As a kid before ereaders were affordable I would download ebooks and print it on the school printer which was able to go down to 4pt font. I would print the books double sided with no margins and I was able to fit entire books on like four to eight pages. I would literally carry around a magnifying glass and use that to read the book that I could carry around in my pocket 😂

This is one of those rare situations where the longer the print-queue is, the better. It's common for pages to be edited multiple times in quick succession, so if the print queue was an hour long, a huge fraction of the print jobs could just be removed from the queue because they were already out of date. This brings up a secondary question though. If your optimization algorithm just naively removed out of date pages from the queue, some pages are edited so often that their updated version would never make it to the front of the queue. You'd probably need an algorithm that decides to let an obsolete edit through the queue every once and a while just so the printed version doesn't fall too far out of date. I'm not sure what the optimum algorithm for that would be.

When I started working at a large teaching hospital, I remember one person during induction giving us the factoid that printer ink was the most costly consumable used on site - including every medication, industrial gas, and imaging isotope - printer ink beat them all (this was to reinforce the significance of unnecessary printing)

You had me thinking "why the hell would you EVER go with ink-jet for this?" there for a second, but you rescued it nicely. 😁

As a pharmacy tech, it was my job to update the "Drug Facts & Comparisons" book. We'd get a packet every month with all the pages that contained edits, and an instruction sheet of what pages to remove and what pages to add. When I left in 2006, the thing was roughly 5 inches thick, with the ability to become about 8 inches thick. No clue if that's still maintained. I hope not. It was really dumb in the digital age.

Imagine printing out all of Wikipedia with no edits and in the future a historian becomes puzzled on how its possible a man called Charlie Sheen could be 'half cocaine'

The written word is so beautiful. It was the comment about how even those shelves full of wikipedia's entire content are small in comparison to your average library. The sum of just currently accessible, recorded human knowledge and creativity is so vast it's almost incomprehensible

Back in 2011 my teachers would edit the Wikipedia pages that were very specific to our current course when we were 13 or 14 and therefore got the entire site banned on our school's Network. Wikipedia is entirely a reliable source as long as you source your source and use Wikipedia as a reference since it literally lists the source of the information in a large area below the article

I used to work in a law library. For a lot of subjects, law textbooks are binders so you can replace the paces when something changes rather than replace the entire book. A big part of my job was doing the actual page replacements. Based on that, I think that this video is seriously underestimating the labour and time costs needed to update the hardcopy of Wikipedia.

I just wanna say I love the vocalizations of all the sounds. Makes me chuckle every now and then 😂

As a former engineer at Ricoh working on commercial continuous feed inkjet printers (roll feed machines printing , there is way more efficient ways to do this. Frankly act print shops that print all the bills and fliers in your mail box could handle a monthly update in an afternoon no problem. We count speed in feet per minute (current model rated at 492 rpm, resulting in approx 1000 sheets per minute). The big difference is ink. Ink is in 10-20L containers and cost orders of magnitude less than desk top ink.

Never knew about dark Wikipedia until I saw this video. I thought it was some 2012 joke, but I did a quick search and now I know that it was a protest for a free internet.