You might want to consider looking at Wikipedia's internal article quality assessments (these include Featured Articles, Good Articles, B-class, C-class, Start,

You might want to consider looking at Wikipedia's internal article quality assessments (these include Featured Articles, Good Articles, B-class, C-class, Start, and Stub). I use these as a rule of thumb for how popular the topic is, it's a solid proxy for both significance and the richness of the available content.