Rome wasn’t built in a day; Wikipedia was
August 6, 2011 4 Comments
How amazing an achievement is Wikipedia?
There are approaching 4,000,000 articles in the English language version. Let’s say that on average each one took 10 hours to write (I think this is way on the high side given how many stubs there are). That’s 40m man-hours. By way of contrast, the Great Pyramid at Giza was estimated to have used an average workforce of 15,000 for 10 years (according to, hmm, Wikipedia), which comes to around 20x as much effort as en.wikipedia.org.
Presume only Americans have contributed and that the average American watches 5 hours of tv per day.
If 3% of the population chose not to watch tv today, then the entire content of wikipedia could be written by them during that time.
Another way of expressing it would be if every adult contributed for c10 minutes you’d have Wikipedia.
Anyway, here is a history of the world in 100 seconds built using geocoding of articles on wikipedia:
Marc Gawley 