“Print Wikipedia (2009–2016) is both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date. The work is also a reflection on the actual transparency or completeness of knowledge containers and history” (project website).
Thus, the artist uses the transfer of the online encyclopedia into the familiar book format as a scale of measurement for the unimaginable amounts of data. Only this makes the dimensions of the collective writing experiment and the extent of the collected knowledge on Wikipedia comprehensible. In total, it takes 7,473 volumes. They include only the text of the Wikipedia articles, not the images and references. They are complimented by a ninety-one volume Wikipedia Table of Contents and a thirty-six volume Wikipedia Contributor Appendix which lists the names of the 7.5 million Wikipedia users who have made at least a single edit to the website. Each volume has its own ISBN.
The artwork, categorized as “poetry” in Lulu’s webshop, was launched and first exhibited at Denny Gallery, New York, in 2015. The exhibition presented a live projected video which displayed the fully automatic generation and upload of the Print Wikipedia volumes to Lulu.com. This process lasted twenty-four days, three hours, and eighteen minutes. Each time a volume was completed and uploaded, an announcement was posted to Twitter (@PrintWikipedia).
In addition to this video, the exhibition featured a selection of printed volumes in front of a customized wallpaper that represented floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of volumes illustrating how much space the entire Wikipedia would take. Mandiberg is convinced: “It is not necessary to print them all out, as our imaginations can complete what’s missing” (Michael Mandiberg, “Making Print Wikipedia”). Sophie Seita has described this strange but very typical state of limbo for print-on-demand, on the threshold of becoming printed in almost the same words as “imagined printedness” (Sophie Seita, “Thinking the Unprintable”).
The individual volumes and the entirety of Print Wikipedia, Wikipedia Table of Contents, and Wikipedia Contributor Appendix are available for sale on Lulu.com. We purchased the first volume of each of the three series for our collection. The script is made available on GitHub.com, including the README files explaining the multi-step process in more detail and noting bug fixes for future iterations. The code parses the entire Wikipedia database, creates print ready PDFs, and uploads them to Lulu.com. The install documents for future exhibitions, covering the upload process and the custom wallpaper’s production, are also available.
Wikimedia cooperated with the project and Lulu.com helped fund it. The reason the artist turned to Lulu in the first place was because uploading such volumes of data and books would surely have led to their account being suspended by the platform because it could be considered a spam or DoS attack.
Like Wikipedia itself, Mandiberg’s project is produced under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA. However, in order to be allowed to use the Wikipedia logo, Mandiberg was supposed to label each volume with the statement “This is a work of art” on the front cover. In the end it was agreed that on the back cover the following note was to be printed in small font, which also clarifies the question of authorship attribution: “CC BY-SA 3.0 2015, Wikipedia contributors; see Appendix for a complete list of contributors. […] This work is legally categorized as an artistic work. As such, this qualifies for trademark use under clause 3.6.3 (Artistic, scientific, literary, political, and other non-commercial uses) as denoted at wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ Trademark_policy. […] This work is not endorsed by or affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.”
The issue of authorship attribution turned out to be problematic. Wikipedia itself recommends naming the five most prominent contributors to each article. But this rule was not feasible for Mandiberg’s gigantic project, apart from the difficult question of what should count as an important contribution: the number of edits, the amount of characters contributed, the very first authorship? An appendix with the names of the 7.5 million Wikipedia users who have made at least a single edit to the website seemed to be a workable solution. This is the first time they are publicly acknowledged. It was well received by the public; in exhibitions of the project there were always visitors looking for their name in the appendix and proudly showing it to others.
From this thirty-six-volume Contributor Appendix, we have acquired the first volume for our collection, titled Wikipedia !-Ahitchins.
From this ninety-one-volume appendix containing a table of contents, we have acquired the first volume for our collection, titled Wikipedia!-1968 All-Ireland Minor Hurling Championship.
In 2016, a German Wikipedia version was produced for the installation “Print Wikipedia: From Aachen to Zylinderdruckpresse” in the Import Projects gallery, Berlin.
The upload took about fourteen days. During this period, the gallery was open to reflect the ongoing work of the program, which was made visible through two channels: a projection of the Lulu.com site in a web browser, and a computer monitor with command line updates showing the dialogue between the code and the site. The script also provided regular tweets on Twitter at @PrintWikipedia whenever a volume was completed.
The German Wikipedia (as it existed on March 5, 2016) amounts to 3,406 volumes. A five-volume Contributor Appendix includes all named contributors to the German Wikipedia. The total of 3,411 volumes was uploaded in May and June 2016. The books printed for the installation are kept by The Archiv der Avantgarden – Egidio Marzona, Dresden.
At the end of 2016, a Dutch Wikipedia was made and exhibited at the biennial Update_6 in Ghent, Belgium. Printing the complete Dutch Wikipedia in October 2016 resulted in 1,165 volumes, including two appendixes for listing all contributors to the Dutch Wikipedia. For this exhibition, 68 of the 1,165 volumes were printed and placed on shelves.
