For the English Wikipedia, you'd need this many.

Six printers is surprisingly few.

But before you try to create a live, updating paper version of Wikipedia, let's look at what those printers would be doing and how much they'd cost.

People have considered printing out Wikipedia before.

In 2012, Rob Matthews printed every featured article, creating a book a couple feet thick.

And in 2015, Michael Mandelberg created an art installation to show the scope of Wikipedia by printing around 1% of its articles, although without images.

The entire encyclopedia would be a lot bigger.

Wikipedia user TomPW has set up a Wikipedia page that calculates the current size of the whole English Wikipedia without images in printed volumes.

It would currently fill a lot of bookshelves, but most libraries have far more books.

Keeping up with the edits would be harder.

English Wikipedia currently receives about 150,000 edits each day, or 100 per minute.

We could try to define a way to measure the word count of the average edit, but that's hard bordering on impossible, and fortunately, we don't need to.

We can just estimate that each change is going to require us to reprint a page somewhere.

Now, many edits will actually change multiple pages, but many other edits are reverts, which would let us put back pages that we've already printed.

So one page per edit seems like a reasonable middle ground.

For a mix of photos, tables, and text typical of Wikipedia, a good inkjet printer might put out 15 pages per minute.

This means you'd only need about 6 printers running at any given time to keep pace with the roughly 100 edits each minute.

The paper would stack up quickly.

Using Rob Matthews' book as a starting point, I did my own back-of-the-envelope estimate for the size of the current English Wikipedia, and based on the average length of featured articles versus all articles, I came up with an estimate of 300 cubic meters for a printout of the whole thing.

By comparison, if you were trying to keep up with the edits, you'd be printing out 300 cubic meters every month.

Six printers isn't that many, but they'd be running all the time, and that gets expensive.

The electricity to run them would be cheap, a few dollars a day.

The paper would be about one cent per sheet, which means you'd be spending about $1,000 a day.

You'd want to hire people to manage the printers 24-7, so depending on wages in your area, this could cost less than the paper, or much less if you can figure out a way to trick Wikipedia's volunteer editors into helping you.

Even the printers themselves wouldn't be too expensive, despite the terrifyingly fast replacement cycle, but the ink cartridges would be a nightmare.

Various sources estimate that for a typical inkjet printer, the real-life cost of ink runs from 5 cents a page for black and white to around 10 cents a page for color.

With 150,000 daily page edits, that means you'd be spending about $10,000 per day on ink cartridges, so you'd definitely want to invest in a laser printer.

Otherwise, in just a month or two, this project could end up costing you half a million dollars.

But that's not even the worst part.

If someday Wikipedia decides to go dark again, like they did in 2012, and you want to join the protest, you're going to have to get a giant crate of markers so you can color every page solid black.

I would definitely stick to digital.