If video killed the radio star, then it's fair to say that Wikipedia killed the printed encyclopedia. Wikipedia has become everyone's go-to site when it comes to finding information on virtually anything, from history to pop culture and everything else in between.
The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is accessible online and people can edit, update and share their knowledge on a variety of subjects. So it seems incredulous for anyone to want to print it all out on paper and even more surprising for someone to want to buy it.
Artist, programmer and educator Michael Mandiberg is doing just that, printing out volumes of Wikipedia as an exhibit titled "From Aaaaa! To ZZZap!" which debuts on June 18 at the Denny Gallery in Broome Street, New York City.
Mandiberg is a seasoned Wikipedia contributor. In 2009, he toyed with the idea of printing the entirety of Wikipedia on paper, but it wasn't until 2012 that he finally pushed through with the project. It took three years of continuous work supported by the Wikimedia Foundation to finally see the project come to life, or should we say, come to print.
For the Print Wikipedia project, Mandiberg created the software that would convert Wikipedia's 11.5 million entries into a print-friendly format. The result is an 11GB compressed file. He approached Dan Dillon, vice president for marketing at Lulu.com, for technical and financial support.
"It's not every day someone comes to you and says, 'I'd like to make a printed inventory of the largest storehouse of human knowledge in English, and would like to use your website,'" Dillon said.
By June 18 when Mandiberg hits the "start" button, the computer program will begin uploading the compressed data from a Mac Mini to the print-on-demand website Lulu.com. An upload page of the site will be projected on the gallery walls of Denny's and will remain open round the clock daily until the upload finishes printing roughly around two weeks later. The printed Wikipedia version is expected to reach 7,600 volumes and can be purchased for $500,000.
Mandiberg admits that though the project is largely futile given the ever-changing and growing nature of Wikipedia, he poignantly states: "Print Wikipedia is both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the inhuman scale of big data. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of Wikipedia's content and the impossibility of rendering the encyclopedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed, it is already out of date."
Though Mandiberg and the Wikimedia Foundation do not expect anyone to buy the entire printed volumes, it is important to them that the public is able to do so if they wanted to.
"The order is so big it breaks the shopping cart. But symbolically, I wanted to be able to say 'Buy It Now,'" Mandiberg said.
Shelling out thousands of dollars may seem too steep, but not to worry, you can still get your hands on individual volumes for just $80. The printed volumes include a 91-volume table of contents listing the nearly 11.5 million articles, 500 volumes containing entries beginning with typographical symbols and numbers, and a 36-volume contributors' index listing nearly 7.5 million named users who have made a contribution or edit in Wikipedia since it began in 2001.
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