Hi,
There are plenty of ways in which Wikidata and VisualEditor could be integrated. Let me ask about the following one:
Given: Let's imagine that the venerable {{Infobox settlement}} template is fully adapted for pulling the data from Wikidata. All the relevant data about the city of Bratislava is entered into its item page on wikidata.org, and in the source of the article [[Bratislava]] you only need to say {{Infobox settlement}} without any parameters.
The people of Bratislava elect a new mayor, and I want to write it in the article. I come to the article [[Bratislava]] and press edit. I click the infobox.
What happens?
As far as I know, no work has been done in this area; PLEASE CORRECT ME if I'm wrong.
My Super-Dream scenario is to be able to edit the Mayor's name write there in the infobox, but I realize that it might be complicated.
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.
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.
Does anybody have any more ideas about it? Am I late to the party and this has already been discussed and designed and I missed it? Please enlighten me :)
Thanks!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore