User:JrandWP/Library of Babel and the sum of knowledge

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Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

The vision of Wikimedia, is to share the world rich knowledge and the ways our world work. However, the knowledge of the world is extremely big and require multiple topics and millions of page to encompass the idea.

In 1941, an Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges has thought of a idea known as Library of Babel, with the goal of encompassing all of the knowledge avaliable in the world by encompassing all of the combinations of 26 characters, numbers and special characters within the space of 410 pages. He thought that by encompassing all the combinations of all the characters in the word, ideas that have, or will be written will exist here and by browsing the library, you can find all of the text you have been written or all the speeches you and all of 8 billion people in the world have spoke / written (informally). Furthermore, it is proven to consist of Hamlet and all of the poems that people in the past and present has been written. And what's more, it would conclude all of the items to be ever existant in the future, all texts that you will write and change the world, all scientific discoveries and all events that would have happened in the future.

However, with such a large library of knowledge like this, there are a number of disadvantages for these kinds of information storage. It is known that most of the information are useless and only just a gibberish, with has nearly no useful content whatsoever. It is known that this library has around 25^1320000 books, with the amount of 10^1800000 -- which is significantly larger than all of the atoms in the observable Universe -- with the number of smaller than a googol. Thus, the probability of seeing a text that is not patent nonsense is nearly close to zero, and it's harder than a Chimpanzee typing a Hamlet by random, but however it still exists and after an enormous number of searches, you would eventually find a book that would constitute useful content.

At the same time, a library like this, even if you remove all the books that does not consist of non-English vocabulary or English sentences (which is doable using some advancement in AI systems and machine learning to remove nonsense texts/non-English grammar texts, which can be randomized using an AI/generative text to point to Library of Babel) there will still be a large number of texts left (it's unknown how much is left but certainly less than a googol for 410 pages, however this combination still grow in exponential scale), and most of these texts are mainly consist of original research and facts that will contradict each other (as this encompass all the text avaliable so there will be a text that contradict another idea, and debates has been seen in real life), so most of the texts are not verifiable. Also, it would mean a violation of five pillars of Wikipedia and this will have a significant number of materials which are not suitable for Wikipedia as a whole.

How many images in Wikimedia Commons are possible?

How many files are possible?

Well, the answer is:

• There are 24 bits of colors in one pixel.
• In the highest resolution, around 7680 x 4320, with has total of 33,177,600 pixels.

So the largest file would have the max of 796,262,400 bits, which is equivalent to 99,532,800 bytes and around 95 MB. We will have 2^796,262,400 files possible here. Even if you add shorter and smaller files, which are compressed, we would need to have no more than 2^796,262,401 files here. That's is a big number, in fact, if you can write it down, it would take 275 million digits. This number of digits means, if this display of digits be divided into smaller pages with 200000 bytes per page, it would take 1,500 pages to write it.

However, Wikimedia Commons does not only accept images, it can accept most other types of files like PDF files, videos and other ideas as well. And there are estimated to be $10^{10^{12}}$ different 10-minute video possible here. And if we can record a video for at most 24 hours, there are around $10^{6.5*10^{13}}$ different videos.

Despite the sheer number of possible recorded files in different file extensions, most files recorded in the sheer amount of videos are mostly gibberish and have no useful content. However, if we just include files that have a meaning and it's not a random type of pixels, the remaining number of images will still be a big number.