Mark J. Nelson, a game AI researcher, writes notes on patents, programming languages, Wikipedia, and algorithms.
HN links his notes on the Tapper videogame patent, broken Wi-Fi access points, and Wikipedia notability; a commenter also mentions his cheap static hosting costs.
A significant portion of articles on any wikipedia are about cities, towns, local governments, local businesses, minor celebrities, landmarks, &c. For major locations like New York or Berlin, there will of course be articles in many languages, but other things that are insignificant outside their locality are likely to only have an article in their native language. Take for example the Catalan wikipedia, which contains a large number of stubs with basic info on locations in rural Catalonia. [1] The English-speaking world is vastly larger in land area and population than the German-speaking world, so I speculate that the difference in size is due to the number of location-relevant articles.
[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/geographically_dense_wikipedia.html
I'm quite happy with them as well. For a static site without big media files it's almost free: hosting http://www.kmjn.org/ there costs me an average of $0.50/mo ($0.10 storage, $0.40 bandwidth).
Having ssh access and quite a bit of tech freedom, for either CGI stuff or just manually run command-line processing, is also quite nice. And although not everyone likes it, I like their idiosyncratic custom web admin panel.
Although this clone is clearly not the case, and I'm not aware any (high profile) cases, it is actually possible to patent the design of a game.
There is a very interesting read about a video game patent:
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html
titled (drum roll) "Video game in which a host image repels ravenous images by serving filled vessels".
Isn't forcing yourself to emulate an expression pretty weird, though? It reminds me of the companies that demand everyone be "enthusiastic" and love their "fun workplace", rather than just allowing people to be quietly good at their job (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html).
You may be interested to read this, though the end result is somewhat disappointing / amusing: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/broken_wifi_access_points.html