I encountered Wikipedia one evening while googling for mentions of Valentinian III. I had a look around, and decided that I could help out here.
I am a native Portlander; one of my ancestors on my mother's side was in one of the last wagon trains to Oregon. I am old enough to remember the promise of Tom McCall's governorship, which now appears endangered by the efforts of bottomfish like Lon Mabon and Bill Sizemore.
True nerd confession: when I was a kid, I used to enjoy reading the encyclopedia. (It was a Funk and Wagnells, for those of you old enough to remember the joke from Laugh-In.) I would spend hours going from one cross reference to another. Hmm: is there an experiment, akin to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, to see if one can get from a given article in Wikipedia to any other article in 6 clicks or less?