An intrepid Wikipedian named Nikola Smolenski has calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia and produced this handy chart showing the relative sizes of the pile of paper and an adult male.

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...out%20Wikipedia

Depends™ on whether it's 1-ply, 2-ply, or extra quilted.

Jonny

Remember what Jimbo Whippales says: Don't squeeze the Admin!

Dang, I wish I could have done better than that.

Greg

Me too! But the fact is, this is no laughing matter.

Even if someone were to take the trouble to write a parser to reformat Wikipedia's text in the manner described, with or without images and tables and templates and so forth, you still have to deal with pagination, indexing, cross-references, ad nauseum. The amount of reformatting work alone would be monumental - it would take thousands of man-hours, maybe tens of thousands to finally get it done. And even if that could ever be finished, the actual printing of that many pages onto even the roughest non-quilted toilet paper would jam nearly every commercially-available printer in existence. I don't even think the technology exists to prevent ink spread on any sort of highly absorbent medium to the extent that people could read the results.

So in the end, people would just wipe their arses with the whole thing anyway. What a waste of time!

Using Der Jimbo's face as a shit-ticket is never a waste of time. Ask Larry Sanger.