This is an essay. May be someone can find it useful.
For a number of reasons which are not appropriate to address here, three weeks ago I voluntarily left Russian Wikipedia, which used to be my home wiki for four years, and decided to turn to low-key activity in the articles in English Wikipedia. I was of course participating in all these strategy discussions, have seen the user statistics, have heard the reasoning about the "low hanging fruit", and was under impression that there is not so much work to do on en.wp, and that I would have difficulties finding topics where I can easily contribute. I had very little previous experience with en.wp, mainly inserting interwiki links, images, and correcting typos and factual mistakes.
Well, for the first article I just happened to notice an important topic where there was no English articles. I created an article on the famous Russian architect Yakov Bukhvostov. That took me several days, and I collected some material which could be interesting for the usability team (what difficulties a novice, even with extended experience of editing a Wikimedia project, can face), but this is not my point. In the meanwhile I got a welcome notice on my talk page which, in particular, contained a link to Wikiproject Russia. I was not going to participate in the project, but followed the link out of curiosity, thinking that the project may have a list of important missing articles, or important articles for improvement, or smth like that. Indeed, it had a number of lists, and, looking through them, I noticed an article on Solvychegodsk listed. Solvychegodsk is a historical town remotely located in the North of Russia, which I happened to visit in 2005, and which I still know pretty well. I followed the link and found an article which was pretty much reasonably, by no means a stub, but where I immediately could see what information I could add. Well, I added the information, extending the article a bit, then followed the link to the Kotlassky District - the second-order administrative unit, similar to a county in the US, where Solvychegodsk was located. The article was shorter than my sentence above describing the district, and had three templates: one saying it is a stub, another one that it is too short, and the third one that it lacks the geographic coordinates. In two or three days, I extended it from 850 bytes to 10kbytes, using Russian sources found in the internet (I also have some books at home, but I did not use them for this particular article) and cleaning up some Commons categories. Then I noticed that out of 20 districts of Arkhangelsk Oblast (to which Solvychegodsk belongs) 10 do not have articles, 9 are in a pitiful state, and 1 I have just extended. I started working on them, and then noticed that some important related articles are missing as well - for instance, I created two articles on district centers, two on (big) rivers located in these districts, and even one on an artist who had an estate in one of the districts. In two weeks I created or considerably improved about 15 articles. First I tried to translate parts of the articles from Russia Wikipedia, but quickly discovered that they contain some factual errors and in most cases also not very extended, so that the articles I created are in most cases better that the articles in ru.wp. I have written all of the articles myself, and used exclusively Russian sources (for most if not all of the subjects, English sources do not exist).
From what I can see, nobody else is working on this class of articles. I
had some help from user Ezhiki in the beginning, and the help was very much appreciated: instead of going to my talk page and trying to explain me smth, he just edited a couple of the pages I was working on, correcting some typical mistakes (templates, some standart names, spelling of Russian names etc which are by no means a common knowledge) and referring to relevant policies. On one occasion, I also asked the wikiproject about a usage of a certain template. All in all, I had not more than 10 edits of other users in "my" articles. Walking to the office today, I tried to calculate how many articles are waiting for my attention. Well, Russia has about 80 republics and oblasts, which amounts to say 2000 districts. Most of them are stubs or non-existent. Including district centers, rivers, mountains, stubs on the towns, some notable persons I would have interest to write an article on, this must be not less than 3000 articles. With my speed of 1 article per day (which presently I am not planning to increase) this would be 10 years of my work. Note that this is just a narrow topic which does not overlap with my professional interest (I am a theoretical physicist specializing in nanoscience). In this field, I am just an amateur (may be slightly above the average level).
My conclusions from the two-weeks experience:
1. May be the really low hanging fruit, almost on the ground level, has been picked up, but in the vast majority of articles there is much room for improvement. Note that I did not add any special things - only the basic info which you expect to find in the encyclopaedia. I did not aim at GA or FA. I used may be 10% of the information I had, and what I had I found in the internet.
2. I seem to be perfectly suited for these articles - I have a general interest in the topic, and also I know Russian and can work with Russian sources. On the other hand, I an not a native speaker, and I can leave some slight spelling errors / incorrect wording etc. This may be a problem, and generally I am not sure how this problem can be solved. However, if I estimate the balance, probably I created more of a useful product than I created troubles.
3. Even for an technically experienced user as myself it is difficult to start contributing to the project. I was able to clear the barrier, but I am afraid many of the regular users would leave, not being able to understand the usage of templates and similar things. On there other side, I got some necessary help, and I know where to ask if I need more.
4. Comparing the quality of this particular class of articles to Russian Wikipedia, I see both advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, there is a high chance that someone just living in the district will add some info in the article in Russian Wikipedia. On the other hand, there are two major problems with these articles in Russian Wikipedia - copyright violation (big pieces are added to articles and stay there for years - things became considerably better with the implementation of flagged revisions, but still persist), and adding a big number of insignificant and often unsourced details, including spamming of local interest websites. The English articles are completely free of these problems. I realize though that this line of reasoning can not be generalized to all articles, since the articles on other topics may have very different issues.
Summing up, there is plenty of room on the bottom (c) Richard Feynman.
Cheers Yaroslav