Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I would expect, but do not have data to support:
That at any time there is small subset of highly active users who
actively use the "MostWanted" features and are personally responsible
for a highly disproportionate number of new articles. I also expect
that there is a much larger group of editors who learn of needed pages
by discovering red-links during their own quasi-random exploration and
do not use the MostWanted feature at all.
I agree. There's a corpus of established editors creating many 'wanted
articles', plus a large base of viewers which occasionally create an
article from a red link they see. Then, you have usual editors which
create an article from a red link because they found it when viewing
another page, not because they searched on Special:MostWanted.
I do not dare to estimate whom is creating more articles, though.
An interesting point I often see as an admin is how, when a page has
been deleted many times (by being created with gibberish), it always has
some incoming links.
It is a variant of the proposed case, as the users aren't creating good
content, but they're reading and following the red link enough (here
they aren't using wantedpages) to make the vandalising noise noticeable.
And leave the admin wondering how, having only a few incoming links
(sometimes even just one!) so much people went ahead and created it with
nothing to say.
Thus, I expect that good creations by random people finding a red link
follow a similar pattern.