To be fair, there's nothing "new" anywhere. When you come up with a name, you probably either saw it somewhere, or pieced it together from other names you've seen. This can be conscious, or not. Same thing with concepts, such as the warrens. The author's brain might consider this "new", since there's nothing exactly like it, but ultimately, imagination doesn't work by creating things out of nowhere, but rather bases itself on memories. So yes, perhaps he inspired himself from wheel of time. He said he didn't read it, but being somewhat big at the time, he might have heard people talk about it and unconsciously inspired himself from it. But I sincerely doubt he "copied" from WoT and tried to hide it by saying he never read it.

I've read wheel of time and to be honest, I don't see that many similarities. I'm not that far into malazan yet however, so that might have yet to come. I find that WoT has way too much drama (drama as in the same kind of stuff your aunt would watch on a sunday morning on tv) which malazan seems to have a lot less of.

Oh any honestly I wouldn't say WoT has "influenced" Sword of Truth. As a teenager, I read the whole thing multiple time as it was the only "good" fantasy series we had at the school's library. It's pretty much blatantly stolen. Much more than malazan potentially having been somewhat influenced, this one is literally the same. In WoT, that have Aes Sedai, women who can channel, follow the Light of the Creator... In SoT you have the exact same thing, being the Sisters of the Light, following the Creator, being women only. As it turns out, they also have a black ajah. And a Dark One. Oh, and red sisters (mord sith) who torture men. Not saying the book isn't good, since it pretty much got me through years worth of boring classes. The author also has done some shady stuff, including asking his fans to publically insult an artist on twitter, as well as declaring his books as "better than other fantasy", basically saying his books are better than the others.