The TLDR:
Wikipedia is an incredibly large resource with over 410 terabytes of data that range from text to images and an expansive edit history. Wikipedia continues to grow each day as more images are uploaded, additional edits are made, and hundreds of articles are published.
The Beginnings
One of the most universally frustrating moments shared by humans is when we run out of storage on one of our devices. Mid-vacation SD card storage alerts, phone memory issues, and running out of disc space on a backup drive have all created moments of difficulty and frustration.
During a recent bout of frustration, my curiosity turned to Wikipedia and all of its contents. How does the Wikimedia foundation handle such a large and vast collection of text, images, and videos?
Breaking Things Down
There are several schools of thought regarding the proper way to calculate the size of Wikipedia, with many arguing that only the text data should be included. Others argue that all content, including images, video, and editing history should be considered in calculations. Others argue that calculations should be based on uncompressed file size, while others argue that calculations should be based on original file sizes as they were uploaded to Wikipedia. For this article, we will use all data within English Wikipedia, including text, images, and videos–in their uncompressed format.
Just The Text
As of early 2025, Wikipedia contained roughly 6.9 million articles with over 4.7 billion words. Combined, these words are an estimated 110 Gigabytes of text.
Although articles are added every day, Wikipedia’s text growth is commonly associated with edits to current articles as editors and researchers continue to add information, details, and new discoveries to articles.
Just The Media
Wikipedia is a part of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia foundation hosts a repository of images, videos, and other media to populate and enhance wikipedia articles. For the purposes of this article, we will consider content hosted within the Wikimedia Foundation as a part of Wikipedia.
As of August 2023, there were over 400 terabytes of images, videos, and other media in Wikimedia to support Wikipedia.
The Size of… Everything
Determining the complete size of Wikipedia is a challenge, but we attempted to compile all of the data, including text, images, videos, media, and edit history of the site. Some argue that edit history should not be included in a total calculation of size; however, the edit history will be used in the general calculation of “everything” since edit histories are recorded and frequently cited as a part of the editing process of articles.
Complete, real time data is not available for all portions of Wikipedia, including the size of the edit history and media. All calculations are based on data that was retrievable in January of 2025.
Text: 110 Gigabytes
Media: 400 Terabytes
Edit History: at least 10 Terabytes (as of 2015)
Total estimated size of Wikipedia: over 410 terabytes of data
Getting Your Own Copy of Wikipedia
Some of the fears of open-source advocates is the elimination of open source, take down of resources, and concern of vandalism of repositories. This has led some to begin regularly downloading portions (or all) of Wikipedia on a frequent basis.
Over the years, several services have been created to easily download the entirety of Wikipedia, including from Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia torrents, and KiWix. Many upload their copies to their website as a backup in the event Wikipedia goes down while others store them on media drives to ensure a backup is saved in the event of internet loss.
A Fun Thing for You To Do
Visit the Wikipedia page on downloading the database of Wikipedia to learn how you can download Wikipedia for the future.
