Or it makes WP more attractive to readers because it has information that can't be gotten from other sources.
Well, that's the trade-off. What's useful to whom? This is why I suggested this had to be a judgment call and that this was not a call for attempting an articulation of hard-and-fast policy (which I think would be not useful). The difficulty of course is also that some people are very vested in their "trivia" for whatever reason (see the Charles Darwin/Abraham Lincoln same birthday debate which went on for months).
Robert Collison's history makes mention of a decision by Britannica (for the 9th edition?) to include topics like farming, metalworking, and so forth, not because they thought they had suddenly become "encyclopedic", but to try to sell EB to middle-class people that didn't have so much of a need for complete coverage of Marcus Atilius Regulus and medieval German literature. Even so, we now know that EB simply failed to report on great swathes of their own culture.
I have nothing against writing sensibly on popular culture impacts and effects. I'm just against such sections being representing such influence as a *list*. Lists are not "content" in the same sense--they are organizational systems, and can be very useful in some situations. But a well-written set of paragraphs about changing attitudes and impact is going to be far more appropriate for an encyclopedia.
Nuclear weapons are one of the areas where 20th-century geopolitics has impinged on the general consciousness, and popular culture references are a reflection of the fears they've come to engender in ordinary people. Not only are the references themselves manifestations of the artists' feelings, but the very urge to add the references tells you something about the fears of WP editors. (There's also a good argument to be made that the desire to delete all the cultural references is a different kind of editorial response to the same fears.)
Again, I'm interested in singling out the aspects which have had a larger impact on culture or popular conception. John Travolta's [[Broken Arrow]] doesn't seem to have done this, at least not in the way that Stanley Kubrick's [[Dr. Strangelove]] did, or John Hersey's [[Hiroshima]] which helped set the entire tone for our thinking about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with creating a psychoanalytic theory of why WP editors add to these lists (I tend to think it is just a well-meaning attempt to contribute, rather than anything to do with the article in question), but anyway it is somewhat irrevalent. The goal is to make a good encyclopedia, not to satisfy the inner motivations of the contributors, as I'm sure you'll agree. Of course this is an issue of taste.
So yeah, if a reference is trivial, maybe it doesn't need to be there, but it would be good to exercise a light touch, keeping in mind the breadth of our audience, and that many (probably most) readers will be far more interested in the culture stuff than the mathematical equations.
As am I, honestly. I just think there are better ways to "do" culture, but I'll admit it takes work and some specialized knowledge to do it. With [[Nuclear weapon]] this is not insurmountable, as there are scholarly works on the impact of them on culture and in politics, etc. (i.e. Spencer Weart's wonderful and highly-recommended _Nuclear fear: A history of images_, well-written and insightful!) But with most topics I'm sure there aren't extensive literature on their culture impacts and it'll become more a matter of opinion, which I think is when it gets into really problematic territory.
FF