Brian M wrote
But when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes a major problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at all.
As far as I can see, WP doesn't have a sense of proportion. It has a sense of mission. The mission is not proportionate to anything conventional.
It would certainly be quite wrong to read anything into relative coverage. I think the positiion is like this: after a certain point pop culture can become spam. Just like a bot creating a page for each prime number would be spamming WP, after a certain point. We have no idea where that point would be - it's a judgement call, it makes little odds to the merit of WP one way or another. Information about the uninteresting is not the threat that disinformation about the interesting is - by a factor of at least 100. We don't need to have a page about every Magic the Gathering card, but if they proliferate it would be much better to purge them en masse some day, than to clog up VfD-type processes.
Charles