Print Wikipedia
Print edition project by artist Michael Mandiberg turned the text of a vast online encyclopedia into a printed set of books. It produced 106 bound volumes, each about 700 pages, representing the encyclopedia as it existed on April 7, 2015. In total, 7,473 volumes would have been needed to print the full text at that time. The 106 volumes contain only the articles, with no images or references. In addition, separate volumes include an appendix listing all 7.5 million contributors (36 volumes) and a table of contents (91 volumes). Including these metadata volumes, 7,600 volumes were created and uploaded to the print-on-demand service Lulu.com.
The project was first shown at the Denny Gallery in New York during the summer of 2015, with a display of the spines of the first 1,980 volumes. From February 24 to May 21, 2016, it was exhibited inside the Charles Trumbull Hayden Library at Arizona State University in Tempe, near the library’s encyclopedia section.
Mandiberg conceived the project in 2009 but faced technical challenges. In 2012 progress arrived after building a complex workflow to compile, format, and upload the entire contents. An assistant named Jonathan Kiritharan helped. The artist’s motivation was to answer the question, “How big is it?” A representative described the project as “a gesture at knowledge.” The work received cooperation from the organization behind the online knowledge project, and part of the funding came from the printing platform.
The project unfolded over three years, and the upload process took about 24 days, 3 hours, and 18 minutes, finishing on July 12, 2015. A separate effort had tried in 2014 to raise funds for a full printout via Indiegogo, but it was abandoned; that plan would have produced about 1.2 million pages in 1,000 volumes and required roughly 80 meters of shelf space. The Denny Gallery show featured only a sample of volumes, while about 2,000 others were represented by spines on the wall. Similar art projects have printed parts of other language editions in Berlin (2016) and Ghent (2016).
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 02:41 (CET).