Mr. Mandiberg, a seasoned Wikipedia contributor with nearly 2,000 edits to his name, first started batting around the idea for the project in 2009. In 2012, he pushed the project to the front burner, throwing himself into what he called “a series of unending nontrivial programming tasks” necessary to formatting the data behind Wikipedia — all of which is freely available online — for upload.

He approached Lulu.com last fall. “It was certainly a very interesting inquiry,” said Dan Dillon, vice president for marketing at the company, which provided technical and some financial support to the project. “It’s not every day someone comes to you and says, ‘I’d like to make a printed inventory of the largest storehouse of human knowledge in English, and would like to use your website.’ ”

There have been other efforts to measure Wikipedia in terms of the printed page. But Mr. Mandiberg seems to have taken the most concrete measure yet of its size — at least as of April 7, when he harvested the data. According to estimates provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, there have been some 7.5 million edits since.

Mr. Mandiberg’s project, like the evolving digital encyclopedia itself, is really “a gesture at knowledge,” said Katherine Maher, chief communications officer at Wikimedia, adding, “The reality is that knowledge has transcended our ability to hold it in volumes on a bookshelf.”

The installation at the Denny Gallery may be titled “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!,” but it takes a while for Mr. Mandiberg’s encyclopedia — the articles are set three columns to a page, mainly using an open-source typeface called Cardo — to get to the letter A.

Image Mr. Mandiberg said he expected that Wikipedia’s millions of articles would fill 7,600 volumes, like the one above. Credit... Mark Kauzlarich/The New York Times

First comes the 91-volume table of contents listing the nearly 11.5 million articles. Then come more than 500 volumes containing entries beginning with typographical symbols and numbers, starting with “!” (the exclamation point), “!!” (notation for an excellent move in chess) and “!!!” (a dance-punk band from Sacramento whose name is usually pronounced “Chk Chk Chk”).