Perhaps start the thing by stealing articles from wikipedia so to have seed base?

I'm going to discourage copying entire articles, as Wikipedia articles will have a lot of information that this wiki won't need (information on substances' history, marketing, etc.); I want the pages to be focused on practicality. There'll probably be some information duplicated, and Wikipedia will be a good source, but if there's an existing Wikipedia article we'll just have a badge linking to it, the way the LW wiki does it.

Also this sounds silly but a cool wiki emblem goes a long way.

Indeed. I'm decent at designing things, so I'll put something up today, but maybe there could be a logo contest at some point if there's enough activity to warrant it.