Do we want more publicity, and if so how?

Wei Dai

Recently reporters from two major national magazines contacted me in preparation for doing stories on Bitcoin. This reminded me that Wired magazine did a cover story on the Cypherpunks in its second issue. I think the LessWrong community is already larger and more active than Cypherpunks were back then, and potentially more influential, but there hasn't been much publicity on us. I'm tempted to suggest doing a story on LessWrong to one of the reporters. Is this a good idea, or bad?

More generally, do we want more publicity, and if so what's the best way to go about getting it?

ETA: Would it be bad etiquette to reveal the names of these magazines at this point, or even to say as much as I've said?

More generally, do we want more publicity, and if so what's the best way to go about getting it?

ETA: Would it be bad etiquette to reveal the names of these magazines at this point, or even to say as much as I've said?

Any suggestions how to get that ideal "steady stream of low-level publicity"? And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?

(Since nobody said it would be bad etiquette to reveal the names of the magazines, I'll mention that they are Wired and New Yorker, and I was thinking of making the suggestion to the Wired writer. If anyone thinks this actually is bad etiquette, please let me know and I'll try to quickly remove this part of the comment.)

(One of the worst things to ever happen to Wikipedia, in my belief, was getting headline publicity - as part of the Seigenthaler affair.)

Did that incident cause a large influx of newcomers to Wikipedia? The article you link to only mentions that Jimbo Wales banned anonymous page creation during that incident, which as I understand was not to handle the newbies drawn by publicity but due to what happened 4 months earlier, when someone anonymously created the fake Seigenthaler biography on Wikipedia.

Any suggestions how to get that ideal "steady stream of low-level publicity"?

I don't really know. Social news sites and peoples' blogs seem like good ways to get this steady drip. If we got a link on front pages of Reddit or Hacker News every few days, that might be enough.

And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive

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1JoshuaZ15y

Yes, that incident did probably result in a lot of newcomers to the English Wikipedia. here is a graph of the number of editors of various Wikipedias. That incident became public in May of 2005. Note how the linked graph shows a take off from that point for the number of editors in the English Wikipedia (the red line). However, the other Wikipedias graphed (German in green, Japanes in yellow, French in blue) do not so such a jump. Those are also some of the largest other language Wikipedias. It is possible that around May 2005 the English Wikipedia hit the point where network effects and related issues caused a severe jump in user base and it is possible that the very large number of people who speak in English allowed that to happen. However, given the timing of the takeoff, the simplest explanation seems to be that the Seigenthaler incident made people pay attention to the project.

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Do we want more publicity, and if so how?

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Do we want more publicity, and if so how?

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