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.