but as far as I can tell, they're almost all utterly reliant on Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder.
How far can you tell?
They say so speaking to them (they used to say so a lot, when it was a novelty - say, 2005-2008), and I get the impression from stories that seem to have been backgrounded from Wikipedia. (Which is admittedly subjective rather than statistics. But when you recognise the Wikipedia writing style ...) I suspect this is a lot of why Wikipedia gets a really easy ride from the press.
Our sister site apparently is:
Interesting, my model of Robin Hanson had him say something about the blackout and how it shows people are hypocrites. Though obviously he has strong opinions on intellectual property. I think it would have been a good idea to Blackout LessWrong today. It would have given us a status boost in most of the communities we frequent.