Making LessWrong notable enough for its own Wikipedia page

I mentioned LessWrong in this article in Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/ten-things-you-should-learn-from-lesswrongcom-2011-7

My book Singularity Rising also cites LessWrong.

The flipside of this is that the page will not necessarily say things about LW that we would want it to say about LW; rather, it will say about LW what can be cited, which means that you would have to somehow wrangle positive coverage from the mundane media. This seems a rather quixotic goal, at best.

The Wikipedia-quality third-party coverage of LW is mostly horrible. Having a WIkipedia article is a curse. This is a real case of "be careful what you wish for."

If MIRI thinks a marketing push is in order, generating enough press for a Wikipedia article would be relatively straightforward. But you have to work out what you want from this, in detail.

I'd be quite cautious about seeking greater media coverage without a plan to deal with an "Eternal September" on Less Wrong.

I just want to mention an immediate thought that I had as soon as I read this. Note that I don't actually endorse this thought, but I still think there is something to it.

First, I was surprised that LessWrong doesn't currently have a Wikipedia article. Then I immediately thought, "How cool is it that I'm part of this large subculture of smart people that is so out of the mainstream that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article! We should never get enough media coverage to pass the notability criteria."

What I gleaned from this intuition is that some of the appeal of LW is that it is non-mainstream.

Oliver Burkeman has occasionally mentioned Less Wrong in his columns for The Guardian. E.g. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields , http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/09/change-life-answer-easier-question .

Someone has to say it: a significant majority of the external coverage I've seen of LessWrong has been focused on Ebxb'f onfvyvfx (warning: it's a potentially hazardous topic), so if there was a LessWrong Wikipedia article it would undoubtedly cover the matter, possibly extensively. No reporter writing about the community could fail to mention it.

I am pretty sure that LW would pass the notability test, as it is linked from many online sources, including dozens of unaffiliated blogs and in passing from an occasional news media article. To start, one could add LW sections to the EY's wiki entry or that of MIRI. Certainly Google search considers LW worthy of extra links.

I cited lesswrong in a paper once.

If someone starts a meetup in a small town, it would not be difficult for them to get a newspaper article talking about the event. Though I'm not sure Wikipedians would consider little-tiny-newspaper to be adequate coverage...

Congratulations. There is now a page on Wikipedia about how weird we all are, with the basilisk and our "weird and unconventional" ideas being front and center on it, since there's little in the way of secondary sources for anything else about the site.

Which, of course, is what I and several other people warned would happen, several months ago. Nice going.

As I said a few days ago regarding getting LW in circulation... Similar idea, less re-inventing the wheel, already paid for, already existing large infrastructures, more spreading of desired discussions: if any of us are in an existing class, incorporate LW topics. Whatever the class, there are ways to make it less wrong. Rather than continuing to talk to each other, we talk to not-each-other (with the added invaluable bonus that outsiders sometimes have criticisms overlooked / suppressed by insiders).

Heck, even Civfanatics has its own (very detailed) Wikipedia page.

A little bit of searching on news.google.com turns up this russian source: http://www.pcweek.ru/idea/blog/idea/6351.php

The Wikipedia page itself will help portray LessWrong as "legit" and also provide information to people that'll help them decide if the site is suitable for them.

I don't really buy that. There are plenty of organisations that have Wikipedia articles that aren't legit. If you look at the RationalWiki page, I don't think it helps people seeing LW as legit.

As far as making the decision whether an webforum is suitable for someone, that decision is usually made by reading the webforum and seeing whether it's content interests you enough to stick around.

I just went ahead and made the wikipedia page (as a stub article with no content except a sentence, a link to LW and a link to establish notability). Please feel free to add content to it.