Thus, it draws the line at things and people that are notable.
Maybe you think it shouldn't be an encyclopedia, but should be some larger project that indexes every product UPC, every person born, and every website ever registered, but that's not what it is.
And the primary obstacle here isn't storage. It's quality. You need a sufficient number of eyeballs and editors per page to ensure that the crowdsourcing is actually passing a minimal quality bar. Millions of short, low-quality articles means millions of opportunity for spam, abuse, and other problems.
But if the pop culture lore has insane depth then it’s probably valuable enough to keep, yeah? If it has a few limited snippets and very few people writing about it as sources, then it’s a lot more questionable
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for Mr. Tik-tok from Oz to have his own Wikipedia page. He's less notable than, say, Knight Artorias, and I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue Knight Artorias deserves one.
Then again, neither does the Great Grey Wolf Sif, yet here we are.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, the only one left, and it gets to define what an encyclopedia will be to everyone from this day forward. Excuses for my it must limit itself are inane.
The disambiguation page of "John Smith" already contains 287 people. You're looking for the John Smith who was a US Navy sailor and received the Medal of Honor in the second half of the 19th century? There's three of them with a page already, and they have to be distinguished by year of birth. No need to make that page hundreds of thousands of non-noteworthy people long, having to be distinguished by SSN.
Wikipedia would rather you create a blog post or any other method of getting information on the internet than to host unverifiable information under their trusted brand name.
We don't have a neat interwiki search yet that makes federation work well, but in time perhaps something like that will develop.