Hello,
My Dream scenario is that the VE understands that the data is pulled
from Wikidata and shows a dialog that is similar to the current
template parameters. I see the old mayor's name in that dialog, I
write the new mayor's name, and the new value is stored in Wikidata.
Of course, it must be taken into account that the name is likely not
just a string, but a label of the Wikidata item.
The problem I see here is that we mostly do not want to replace a value
but rather add another preferred one and state that the old one is now
deprecated. This means, we also want to have the old major on the
Wikidata item but the new major should be marked as preferred. I think
we have to think a lot how this can be implemented best in Visual
Editor. Maybe we should just add the value entered there just as another
preferred value but this is rather a guess because the data might also
be simply wrong and should be replaced. We thus have to investigate how
often the value should be replaced and how often the old value should be
kept as well. Then we can decide a way how the visual editor should use
this data without being to complicated but also offering all options to
create the data as intended.
My acceptable-but-suboptimal scenario is taking the
user to
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6850543 . This is probably a useful
workflow for the tech-savvy editors, but it's suboptimal for a casual
editor. I'll go as far as saying that for a casual editor it may be
(relatively) more comfortable to edit parameters in a MediaWiki
template ("|mayor =[[Milan Ftáčnik]]") than to go to
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6850543 and find the value.
We might take the user to the item's page on Wikidata if he wants to
make more enhanced edits like replacing an old edit.
Does anybody have any more ideas about it?
For the technical implementation, we have to find a way which data comes
from which item and which property. Maybe we can add some data-item and
data-property attributes to the HTML tag in which the data is stored so
that the visual editor can easy find these transclusions. However, this
might also be a security issue if the attributes are added to elements
not containing Wikidata data.
All in all, you are surely not late and this discussion has just started
at Wikimania (although it is planned much longer to have something like
that). Therefore, I think this feature hasn't hightes priority at the
moment and needs lots of cooperation with the Visual Editor team.
Perhaps we will start developing not before 2016. (Only my personal
guess. :-)
Best regards,
Bene