Hello!
As for mapping Wikipedia templates to wikidata properties I think
James F. mentioned something about including that into templatedata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData
That's not quite right; I don't think TemplateData is necessarily the
right avenue for Wikidata, though of course it might be possible to
extend it for this case.
To VisualEditor, Wikidata properties are "just" another kind of
transclusion, like templates, magic words, and parser functions. It's
possible for VisualEditor to see an existing Wikidata reference as
just another transclusion and not care where it comes from. For
example, if you had the wikitext "{{#property:P646}}" (Freebase
identifier) on enwiki's Foobar, you get something that sort-of looks
reasonable
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17195534/Screen%20Shot%202014-08-13%20at%2019.29.49.png>
but
is not very user-friendly.
We haven't yet built in anything that lets you edit existing
non-template transclusions very well[0], and we also don't support
creating them yet (which is probably best done with a little pop-up
listing all the available properties, their values and maybe
description in the user's language).
Ok, the transclusion with |{{#property}}| is one point which perhaps
isn't too hard to solve. However, most of the infoboxes etc. will
perhaps be created by a lua module and then it isn't trivial any more to
find the place some specific information comes from. This is the point I
think will make the thing tricky.
Longer-term I'd like to explore editing (rather
than just re-using)
values on Wikidata from straight within VisualEditor. However, I worry
that that would need some exploration as to how we can avoid giving
users a difficult set of explanations about differing community
expectations of how they should work and what they should and should
not do (quite apart from the different licence).
For example, a newbie-ish user of cswiktionary may not appreciate that
Wikidata entries are not just magic but also done following some
complicated conventions, and without a pan-wiki talk page they won't
even notice that they've been bugged about making mistakes and
violations until they eventually get blocked and complain that it
stopped working.
Yes, this is a problem and the reason why I suggested to make the edit
interface as intuitive and simple as possible. Concerning the Wikidata
policies, we may need some sort of global talk page where users can be
notified from any place. However, the better way would be of course to
not even let the users make mistakes by explaining the expected format
well enough.
Maybe the least-controversial thing to edit remotely
would be language
links, as they are heavily constrained and relatively simple, so maybe
that would be the best place to start[2] (replacing the existing too
in the sidebar).
Patches welcome! :-)
Indeed, although the language links are also a very different
thing as
they are not transcluded in the article at all and do not need Visual
Editor for being edited.
Best regards,
Bene