《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第118期:紙質版維基百科(1)

UPDATING A PRINTED WIKIPEDIA

紙質版維基百科

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

Q．如果你要把整個英文版維基百科打印出來，那麼你需要多少臺打印機才能趕上網絡版本的更新速度？

——Marein Könings

——馬裏安•科寧斯

A. THIS MANY.

A．這麼點就夠了。

If a date took you home and you saw a row of working printers set up in his or her living room, what would you think?

如果你的男友/女友帶你回家，你發現他/她的客廳裏有一排打印機轟轟作響，你會怎麼想？

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

原來只要這麼點兒打印機就夠了！但在你打算自己打印一套實時更新的紙質版維基百科出來之前，讓我們先看看打印機需要幹些什麼……以及這麼做要花多少錢。

Printing Wikipedia

打印維基百科

People have considered printing out Wikipedia before. One student, Rob Matthews, printed every Wikipedia featured article, creating a book several feet thick.

事實上曾有人考慮過把維基百科全部打出來這個想法。幾年前，一個叫作羅布•馬修斯的學生把維基百科上的所有“特色條目”都打印了出來，於是就有了一本一米多厚的書。

Of course, that's just a small slice of the best of Wikipedia; the entire encyclopedia would be a lot bigger. Wikipedia user Tompw has set up a tool that calculates the current size of the whole English Wikipedia in printed volumes. It would fill a lot of bookshelves.

當然了，這些只是維基百科所有精華的九牛一毛，整個維基百科要比它大得多。一名維基百科用戶Tompw建立了一個頁面，計算整個英文維基百科如果全部打印出來要佔多少地方。結論是它至少會填滿好幾十個書架。

Keeping up with the edits would be hard.

要想趕上實時更新的速度可不容易。

Keeping up

趕上更新速度

The English Wikipedia currently receives about 125,000 to 150,000 edits each day, or 90–100 per minute.

英文版維基百科現在每天有12.5萬～15萬次修改，相當於每分鐘有90～100次。