Inside the Plan to Print All of Wikipedia and Send It to the Moon - Motherboard: The laser used to engrave the disk is able to print 300,000 dots per inch (DPI). To put this in perspective, most printers you’d find in your home or office max out at around 4800 DPI. According to Spivak, the patented printing technique will only take about a month to engrave the entirety of Wikipedia on the disk.
“We have the only capability in the world today to write this much data, this precisely, in such a small form factor,” Spivak told me on the phone.
In order to maximize space, Spivak and his colleagues are reformatting Wikipedia articles to cut bloat like white space and metadata. Moreover, the Arch Mission Foundation is developing an algorithm that will arrange the Wikipedia articles in such a way that they will be hyperlinked across the disk. In other words, if one article references another article, a reader will be able to locate that article on the disk using an algorithmic organizational scheme.
“We have the only capability in the world today to write this much data, this precisely, in such a small form factor,” Spivak told me on the phone.
In order to maximize space, Spivak and his colleagues are reformatting Wikipedia articles to cut bloat like white space and metadata. Moreover, the Arch Mission Foundation is developing an algorithm that will arrange the Wikipedia articles in such a way that they will be hyperlinked across the disk. In other words, if one article references another article, a reader will be able to locate that article on the disk using an algorithmic organizational scheme.