Lars,
Perhaps you and I are the only ones on this list who are interested, but since I'm enjoying the discussion...
[snip]
Now, in a growing wiki the country (the whole) is the knowledge that readers have, and which they could potentially write about. The strategic targets are the actual edits they will contribute, which is a lot smaller than the whole country. Planting a lot of stubs is carpet bombing, dropping stubs on various topics, hoping to find the topics of those future manual edits. The 50% number in your report means that 50% of those future edits (targets) were hit by the stub carpet bombing. But that number doesn't say anything of the precision of the carpet bombing. How many of the planted stubs failed to attract any manual edits?
As of this moment, you're absolutely right, the vast majority of gene stubs have gone unedited. But I'm sure everyone here recognizes that there's a "critical mass" aspect to growth, and the recent publication is only the first step in this process. Also, it's worth noting that there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of graduate students worldwide whose mission is to discover the function of a human gene or genes. I'm quite confident that over time, >95% of those gene pages will be edited. Unfortunately, there's no good way to predict precisely which gene pages will take off first, so we limited ourselves to the top ~9000 genes (ranked by # of citations). Ultimately, this was a threshold that EN WP was comfortable with, and I think a good tradeoff between short-term stagnant articles and long-term growth.
That would be an interesting study, especially if you could repeat it with different size and quality of the stubs.
While the scientist in me says that this type of controlled experiment would be interesting, practically speaking I don't think this is a realistic project. Why would any wiki community support purposely creating suboptimal stubs? The goal of this Gene Wiki effort (and I have to assume all bot-creation efforts) is to create the best stubs possible. And then it's up to the community to decide whether the benefit of creating those stubs (factoring in the potential for downstream manual edits) is worthwhile.
Cheers, -andrew