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.
Eyeballing that chart myself, I don't see a "jump" around May 2005. It looks to me like the growth was pretty steady until Nov 2005, where there was a big jump over the next few months.
Ah, looking at the Wikipedia article on the incident more closely, it didn't become major news until November, so that explains that.
So the next question is, what evidence is there that the newcomers drawn by the incident was overall detrimental to Wikipedia? Again gwern's linked post does not seem to talk about this. ETA: Never mind, I retract this question after seeing gwern's other recent comments.
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?