How far we have to go

This chart comes from a post by Terry Hancock at Free Software Magazine, "Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg". It's hard to come to grips with the scale of Wikipedia, which is growing faster than anyone could keep up with reading 24/7. But any well-stocked university library has two, sometimes three, orders of magnitude more content than English Wikipedia; the aggregate collection of library material is tens of thousands of times larger the Wikipedia. Of course, many books have overlapping content and encyclopedia articles will rarely go into as much detail as books on the same topic.

But most writing that was worth printing in the first place has something of relevance for Wikipedia.