Great idea.

The first approach involves analyzing Wikipedia templates to look for explicit references (i.e. “#property:P<some number>”) across all templates.

This syntax is rarely never used on fr.wiki (it's even now forbidden in the main namespace) where almost all calls to Wikidata is done through modules (we had an RFC which *kind of* make it mandatory).

Meanwhile on fr.wiki, we extensively use categories (automatically added) for tracking Wikidata, main cat is https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Page_utilisant_Wikidata_par_propri%C3%A9t%C3%A9 ; I'm curious to have a comparison to see if a lot of Wikidata calls are untracked by categories.

Cdlt, ~nicolas