@Pginer-WMF any thoughts on the behaviour here?

The "New page" was added to the list of options to contribute as a simple basic activity to prevent the menu to be too empty when launched. However, in the current implementation (linking to WantedPages):

• It provides no guidance to create articles (just red links). Article creation is challenging for newcomers.
• It may need per-wiki customization (as surfaced in this ticket), making its implementation more complex. This kind of customization is something we may need to support for scaling the system, but I think it would be better to consider for a future iteration.

Given the above, I'd be more inclined to either (a) replace the "New page" activity with another one that is better supported across the board, or (b) find an alternative way to support the "New page" activity that is more universal.

Providing a basic set of activities first would help us understand how are those used in practice and learn more about the needs for scaling the system (customizations per wiki/user, access to frequent activities, etc.)

If we expect "Requested articles" (on the wikis where it is available) to be always more useful than Special:WantedPages, another possibility could be to make the "New page" activity to link to "Requested articles" page where it exists and link to Special:WantedPages as a fallback when the other page is not available.

In any case, for the most immediate step the plan is to expose this menus on mobile for a reduced number of small-size Wikipedias (where mobile translation is available). In that context, this would not be an immediate blocker. We may need to consider alternatives (replace the option, the page it links or provide more customization options) as we scale the system.

@Pginer-WMF or we could make the page a message that can be configured e.g. MediaWiki:special-contribute-newpage-name

new ContributeCardActionLink(
				SpecialPage::getTitleFor(
				     $this->localizer->msg( 'special-contribute-newpage-name' )->text()
				)->getLocalURL(),
				$this->localizer->msg( 'view-missing-pages' )->text()
			)

https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/includes/specials/Contribute/ContributeFactory.php#L47

In T321379#8394570, @Jdlrobson wrote:

@Pginer-WMF or we could make the page a message that can be configured e.g. MediaWiki:special-contribute-newpage-name

For this particular case, it seems that linking to Special:WantedPages is not expected to be very useful for either large or small wikis due to missing templates crowding the list (and lack of namespace filtering). So it may be preferred to link to Wikipedia:Requested articles when the page is available, and not show the action when it is not.

The initial set of wikis selected for the initial enablement in T319362 have this page. So users will have several options to chose from the "Contribute" menu.

Later we can consider the broader question of customization, and explore possible approaches.

Agreed that Special:WantedPages is almost entirely useless for the average user, due to the lack of search/sort options. On large wikis there might be some kind of guided article creation process such as enwiki's article wizard. The requested articles list is definitely a better option than WantedPages, but really I'd expect some interface where I can say what article I want to create and then I get to create it. (Which is one of the major design blunders of MediaWiki which somehow survived for 20 years, that there isn't really any easily discoverable way to start a new article.)

So IMO:

1. create a simple special page for starting a new article - basically just an input field for the title, and then it sends you to that title with action=edit applied.
2. link this special page by default from the card, but make it configurable with a system message so wikis which provide a more guided article creation workflow can use that instead.d

The proposal to have a proper place to start articles (being configurable per wiki, providing adequate guidance, etc.) makes total sense. However, that may be increasing the scope too much for an initial release of this entry point.
In order to avoid increasing the number of dependencies, I created an initial ticket for the adjustment of the link to amore useful page T327063: Adjust "New page" option of the Contribute options to point to a community page when it exists. This seems the simplest change to have things ready for an initial deployment to a small set of wikis and iterate from there.

I filed T327464: Create a special page for starting a new article about having a (minimalistic) entry point for starting a new page.