OK, we admit it: here at CNET News.com, we pay a lot of attention to Wikipedia.
Politicians' aides using the encyclopedia to make snide comments about one another's bosses, inaccurate reports of celebrities' deaths and false information related to JFK's assassination have done little to mitigate fandom for the site's community-contributed pages.
Especially notable is Wikipedia's extensive collection of entries on pop culture figures. Who knew, for instance, that there was once an A-Team comic strip that chronicled the further adventures of those wacky crime fighters from the mid-1980s?
Wikipedia readers can, for the most part, measure a subject's popularity by its entry length. A television show featuring TV babes Alyssa Milano and Shannen Doherty as demon-fighting witches has received a more extensive Wikipedia write-up than one on the actual Salem witch trials, for instance. The witch trial history, judging by the numbers, is hardly as thrilling as the Charmed Ones battling evil--and their own frustrating inability to get dates on Friday nights.
To illustrate this point, here are the word counts for some pairs of Wikipedia entries on historic events and some related terms:
Salem witch trials: 7,737
List of Charmed episodes: 8,832
Visigoths: 2,725
Goth subculture: 5,238
Photo by Wikipedia
