How Many Printers Would Be Needed to Print Out All of Wikipedia Including Every Edit

As part of the ongoing “What If?” series by Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics, Munroe explained what would happen if an enterprising soul wanted to print out all of Wikipedia, including every edit.

If you had a printed version of the whole of Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version?

The answer, according to Munroe, is six. But they would have to be running 24 hours a day, printing out nearly 600 cubic meters of paper for the whole thing.

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 print out 300 cubic meters every month. …a good inkjet printer might  put out 15 pages per minute. That means you’d only need about six  printers running at any given time to keep pace with the roughly 100 edits each minute…Six printers isn’t that many, but they’d be running all the time. And that gets expensive.

Munroe also suggests a change in hardware.

Various sources estimate that for a typical inkjet printer, the real-life cost of ink runs from 5 cents per page for black-and-white  to around 10 cents per page for color. With 150,000 daily page-edits, that means you’d be spending around ten  thousand dollars per day on ink cartridges. So you definitely want to invest in a laser printer.