Adrian wrote:
Seriously, why can't we? We're getting swamped with fan-writing on all sorts of topics, much of it related to popular culture.
I just hit "random page" ten times. I got articles about:
*disambiguation page for two shahs of Persia *a road in Cambridgeshire *a political party in Nicuragua *an Asterix and Obelix film *a primitive genus of civet-like hyena *a well-known victim of a gay-bashing murder in Canada *a taxon containing the placental mammals (factual accuracy disputed) *the debut solo album by the former White Zombie singer Rob Zombie *a line of Nash automobiles produced from 1932 until 1957 *a Hindi film about homelessness in New York
It's just a glimpse, of course, and doesn't take into account relative article size, but it doesn't look like Wikipedia is being "swamped" with fan writing. It would be interesting to see a more rigorous and statistically significant sampling of Wikipedia's coverage by area.
Actually, thanks to categories, it might even be possible to get an exhaustive analysis of Wikipedia's subject area coverage. I wonder if anyone's done something like that before.