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

As part of the ongoingWhat If?"series byRandall Munroeofxkcdand Henry ReichofMinutePhysics, 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 tokeep pace with the roughly 100 edits each minute...Six printers isn't that many, but they'd berunning all the time. And that gets expensive.

Munroe also suggests a change in hardware.

Various sources estimate that for a typicalinkjet printer, the real-life cost of ink runsfrom 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 investin a laser printer.