At Wikimania in Gdansk someone from Google gave an interesting if somewhat
controversial presentation on search improvements this way.
From my memory of the presentation - it was a few years
ago; For several
languages including some Indic ones, I think Bangla and Telegu,
Google had
listed the 500 most common search terms that didn't have a Wikipedia
article.
They had then paid some translators to translate articles from English into
those languages.
This had become controversial because it resulted in a number of articles
on Hollywood film stars, and at least one of the editors in those wikis
didn't think that people who spoke his language were interested in
Hollywood filmstars. Also the people writing those articles didn't behave
as if cooperating with the community was part of their remit. One language,
it may have been Bangla, actually blocked the translators.
But logically the less complete a Wikipedia the more likely it is to have
search terms that we could create articles for.
I could even buy the idea that few of the unsuccessful searches on English
have an obvious article.
But for smaller Wikipedias this would be a useful tool to promote growth
and to be more reader focussed.
If the list was only made available as a deleted list so only admins could
read it then that should resolve the issues of some searches being terms we
wouldn't want to publicly list.
WSC