The complaint that Wikidata serves an in-crowd is something that I feel is correct. It follows from being overly interested in the academic side of things. All the work by the professional developers is for esoteric things and much if not most of the work does not translate into things that benefit the people who are actually involved in Wikidata. To add insult to injury when the argument is made that users will benefit from particular improvements those improvements are denied typically because of secondary use considerations. This is why we do not have automated descriptions for instance. Recently the format of the dump changed but only secondary use of Wikidata benefits. A lot of work was done on query but in 10 months we have not seen any result. When the "featured article" functionality was introduced it was not by WMDE developers, the same is true for the label lister, the order of available labels ...

So far official Wikidata development is mainly backroom work. Maybe important, but because of the lack of interest in the user experience and productivity there is no idea and probably no interest and expertise in how to make the regular editors and the noobs happy and productive. It is not as if there is no example how it could be. The tools by Magnus serve EXACTLY the same data to a user. They are intended for use by people and they do generate a lot of contributions. These tools are only hampered by the lack of stability of the labs environment however they do provide a user centred experience. 

I salute the fact that Wikidata wants to become more user friendly but it starts with understanding what people need and how people work. The agenda for these things could make it easy and obvious for people to move with the flow of change. There may be moments when there is a break with standard practices for technical considerations.That will not happen often when the focus is on the use of Wikidata.

I have stopped arguing about Wikidata development and user experience because every time other considerations have the priority. For me many of the features of the Reasonator are must have for Wikidata. The most urgent one is that we ALWAYS see a label in whatever language. I do recognise English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish etc names. Why have numbers when there is no label in Dutch? This one feature alone prevents people from using Wikidata in the the 270+ other languages Wikidata supports.

Thanks,

      GerardM