I would like to be send an email to an address that mediawiki can pick up and have mediawiki take it and generate a new page from it as a starting point. More complicated stuff
There is this extension - EmailToWiki
It relies on a POP3 account being available and has been in Beta for a long time, but it may be a good start for what you want to do.
Have a daemon of some sort running on the server that picks up emails from an account (through POP protocol presumably), use the Mediawiki API to generate stub page.
Instead of a daemon, you could just have a cron
job of some form.