In popular culture

In popular culture refers to the true mission of Wikipedia: to create lists of every TV show, movie, song, book or video game that has ever mentioned the subject of a Wikipedia article, even if the subject is just a word.

Development

Wikipedia policy has been carefully set up to encourage the development of "in popular culture" lists.

There are thousands of teenagers and basement dwellers who have internet access and believe that shit on TV is important.
Wikipedia lets anyone edit articles without even registering, so every one of these people can look up an article, add a sentence about how it was mentioned in Family Guy that night, and never visit the site again.
Registered users are required to assume good faith for these edits.
Removing anything from a Wikipedia article draws the attention of the recent changes patrol and its army of bots.
If a noob keeps removing popular culture lists, he will eventually run into an administrator who orders him to discuss why he doesn't think the article on Pachabel's Canon should mention that it was used in a 1979 McDonald's commercial.
At this point, he either argues with the administrator until his brain melts, or he ignores the administrator and gets b&.
The list is then split off to a separate article and continues growing until it becomes self-aware.

Some argue that "in popular culture" lists are merely collections of trivia. This is not true, as the following comparison proves:

Computer Stew. Hawking's image was animated and used as a character in several episodes.
Doctor Who. In the episode "Doomsday", Mickey Smith compares the Cybermen talking to the Daleks as "Stephen Hawking meets the speaking clock", obviously due to both the villan's voices being similar to Hawking's.
The Wrong Coast. A segment of the show tells about a movie called Party Time Continuum, in which Hawking is portrayed as a time-travelling party-animal played by Seth Green.
Weebl and Bob. In their clip Balance, Stephen Hawking flies across the screen in his buggy and the various characters play around with his speech synthesiser against his will, making it say strange things, such as "I've wet my pants".
etc.

Computer Stew. Hawking's image was animated and used as a character in several episodes.
Doctor Who. In the episode "Doomsday", Mickey Smith compares the Cybermen talking to the Daleks as "Stephen Hawking meets the speaking clock", obviously due to both the villan's voices being similar to Hawking's.
The Wrong Coast. A segment of the show tells about a movie called Party Time Continuum, in which Hawking is portrayed as a time-travelling party-animal played by Seth Green.
Weebl and Bob. In their clip Balance, Stephen Hawking flies across the screen in his buggy and the various characters play around with his speech synthesiser against his will, making it say strange things, such as "I've wet my pants".
etc.

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