I'd like to put in my two cents as a relatively new (about a year) player. The short version is this: if, during the first couple of months, I had Google'd Shadowrun and found the state of the fandom websites in the state it is now, I may have given up on the system then and there. It's pathetic, frankly. You've got websites from the Geocities era whose entire content is lists of house rules they like and this is one of the top 10 Google results for some relevant Shadowrun search. You've got the Sixth World Wiki, full of topic titles in some other language (Swedish, I think?) and broken links.
This isn't a perception limited to Google, either, and the perception is itself hurting the popularity of the game. I'm on staff for an anime convention (Anime Punch), and for the tabletop gaming room I brought up the idea of running an anime-themed Shadowrun game. The first person to respond to the idea said "Isn't Shadowrun sort of not the cool game anymore?" and the discussion grounded from there. There was no Shadowrun at AP.
Lucky for me, I read the sourcebooks before I started googling. And the sourcebooks are, as most of us will agree I'm sure, in pretty excellent shape. But not everyone does that, as the anecdote illustrates.
If I were running the show at Catalyst, I would hire somebody to, if nothing else, maintain the Sixth World Wiki and make it not look like such a ghost town. It's hurting the game.
