The two researchers, whose project was partially funded by the European Commission, found that before an article is created it usually already has incoming links, in the form of [[red links]]. Most articles get written within a month after the first red link. Furthermore, incoming links increase exponentially until the article is written, thus making the links blue, at which time the increase becomes linear. Articles are usually created by a different Wikipedian than the contributor who inserted the first red link to it.
I infer that Wikipedians use red links as a way to communicate with one another about which articles should be written first. The ?MediaWiki software also includes the ?MostWanted special page in which it counts how many incoming red links each article has. Wikipedia also has the [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] page.
I regard the use of the red links for identifying articles most needed to be written as an example of communication through stigmergy in Wikipedia. I am, however, somewhat concerned about whether most Wikipedians prefer to get this information from the articles themselves or from the ?MostWanted ?MediaWiki/Wikipedia features, and whether this could affect the stigmergic nature of the communication. I feel that they probably get this information from the articles themselves spontaneously, and in that case it very much looks like stigmergy; but if they get the information from the centralised ?MostWanted page, is it still stigmergy? I would think yes, albeit the stigmergic nature of the communication may appear to be somewhat more weak than in the other case. What do other subscribers in the wiki-research-l mailing list think?
From a post to Wiki-research-l by Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
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.
From reply by Platonides@gmail.com