I think the LessWrong user pages are underutilized. There isn't even a wiki pages describing them (or at least I can't find it, otherwise I would have linked it here).
The user pages are what is shown when you click on a user like you would do to see that users other contributions, his karma and to send a personal message. These user pages are maintained and editable in the wiki but embedded in the blog view. This link makes these pages highly visible in everyday LW browsing and could create an awareness of LWers preferences.
Example: me in LW vs. me in LWWiki
Currently only 3 of the top ten poster have one (including EY). And this despite it being so easy to create them via the LWWiki (switch to the Wiki via the link in the nav bar and then click on your name). I guess it's partly because the sync-feature is relatively new.
JoshuaFox recently proposed to indicate your interest in business networking on the user page. But that is only one bit of information you could put there. Another information I'd like to see are the tags proposed on the LW Community Weekend Berlin which could indicate
- your openness to personal messages
- your willingness to answer questions (to specific topics); one special sub-case might be willingness to proofread posts of non-native speakers (the welcome page mentions four persons explicitly three of whom have not posted recently).
- whether you operate under Crockers rules (a tag seen very often on the Berlin badges)
- other information of this kind like offers of help, dating, ...
I've made a template for UserInfo. Very open to suggestions on parameters, default text, ordering, category names. It's a wiki, so you're welcome to improve it if you feel you have something to add, or let me know and I'll do the editing.
Try it out on your userpages by adding {{UserInfo |network= |questions= |proofread= |messages= |helpwith= |crocker= }} to your userpage, or see the quick documentation for more details.
It would be pretty easy to set up a little template with a bunch of parameters which generates a nicely formatted box. Could also add categories automatically so it'd be easy to, for example, go to the category of people interested in business networking. More ambitious things which could be added include queries (e.g. search for business network people in bay area), though that'd be much easier with Semantic Mediawiki, something which excludes a user from certain categories/searches if they have been inactive for a certain length of time (easiest would likely be with a magic word extension for medawiki which returns a user's last active date).
I can throw together a basic template later, then edit it based on feedback on parameters?
Is this something that can be done on top of the existing LW/LWWiki code base? If so, it could be useful.
(In general, it seems that the LW community has a lot of aspiring developers who would like to help the community while getting recognition and experience, and could be called on for incremental improvements. But I am not involved enough to know if that's practical.)