::Distracting the reader from the prose? Are you saying that long blocks of prose are attractive?   

 ::You are devoting hours of your personal time to this content. It appears to be a topic that you care about. I presume you actually want someone to read it. Research has shown time and again (see Jakob Nielsen's site Useit.com for studies) that web users prefer to scan rather than read. Long blocks of paragraphs have been shown to reduce readability and thus the likelihood that someone will actually plow through what you have so passionately devoted yourself to writing. You are visually discouraging the visitor from reading your work.  

 ::The Legacy paragraph is incredibly dense. The current readability (Gunning-Fog Index) for this paragraph is (6-easy 20-hard) 14.9, rating it above the Atlantic Monthly. Other scores:  

 ::Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:   	   
 ::*Coleman-Liau Index:  	 14.37 
 ::*Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test:  	 18.41  	  
 ::*ARI (Automated Readability Index):  	 18.97  	  
 ::*SMOG:  	 17.78 

 ::As a professional technical writer, I've learned it's the writer's job to do the heavy lifting and extra work on the back end to give the reader ready access to the content. Thus generous use of subheads, white space, short paragraphs, including bulleted lists, are recommended. Although Wikipedia positions itself as an encyclopedia, that doesn't mean it should be written so that the content is hard to understand. 

 ::In this instance, the list method communicates in a glance, and thus much more effectively, the vast array of awards Hanna won, which is really your intent anyhow  without forcing the reader to read every single one.  

 ::As to the footnote issue, it's generally acceptable to footnote the lead-in paragraph rather than each item. Aren't there any Wikipedia standards about readability? Certainly there ought to be. 

 ::Let's remember, this guy wrote cartoons.  

 ::