I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems like a fun thing to me: posting about the things that have interested me while noodling around on Wikipedia. So, hey … new category. Here’s the first installment:

• Falls Church, Virginia is the smallest city in the United States, in terms of surface area. Yes, 10,377 people lived in 2.0 square miles at the time of the 2000 Census. I mean, that’s not Manhattan-level population density, but it does make one think. You could reasonably walk the perimeter of the city in a hour or so, and … yeah.
• There are 3,077 counties in the United States, an average of 62 a state. There’s only one state with 62 counties—New York. Since when is New York average in anything?
• Jeff Tweedy sings, “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” What are the poorest places in the United States? As someone who has lived in the twin states of Mississippi and Alabama for the last 16 years, I figured that plenty of places in those two states would be high on the list. I was wrong; South Dakota has four of the five-poorest counties in America. All four of those counties have, as you might expect, Indian reservations. Starr County, Texas, on the Mexican border, is the poorest U.S. county without a reservation in it. Mississippi’s first listing is #17, and Alabama’s is #27.

Unlike most of my Wikipedia excursions, I can actually remember how this one got started: I asked myself what the major metropolitan areas were in the Mountain Time Zone. Seeing that two Texas counties were in the Mountain Time Zone, I then got interested about counties, and … well, there it went.

What’ve you been looking at on Wikipedia lately?