Well, I could make a view that shows the diff of a Wikipedia article stacked on top of the diff for the corresponding Wikidata item on my computer in a few minutes. But diffs can be very long sometimes, so there would be a lot of discussion about whether that view is more appropriate than just making it easier to find the link to the Wikidata item on the diff and edit pages for articles that include Wikidata properties. But the work-around you suggest is not a work-around. If the U.S. article currently says: "The population of the U.S. is 309,000,000 people." And I change it to say "The population of the U.S. is {{#property:population|current-value=309000000}} people." Which scenarios does that improve?
> From: g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 21:22:15 +0200
> To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Page history and properties
>
> On 5 April 2013 20:05, Michael Hale <hale.michael.jr@live.com> wrote:
> > The thing to remember is that the history of a page is the history of the
> > wiki markup for the page, not the history of the rendered HTML. It would be
> > misleading if edits were shown in the markup history for an article each
> > time a template or Wikidata item changed because reverting the markup to
> > that version wouldn't actually revert the change. I think what curators with
> > specific specialties want is the ability to automatically expand their
> > watchlist to include all templates and data items that could affect their
> > watched pages. Then a way to view the merged watchlists from multiple
> > projects would be helpful. There is room for improvement in global account
> > integration. For example, I just noticed that I need to set my timezone on
> > Wikipedia and Wikidata independently.
>
> I partly agree, the ideal situation is that
> a) changes of wikidata (and perhaps templates, and perhaps images,
> with decreasing necessity in practice) show in the page history
> b) in the diff, such changes are shown separately from the changes of
> the wikitext itself, but with the same action. This can be achieved by
> showing the affected changes after a separation line below the
> wikitext diff.
>
> However, since this was rejected previsously as undoable, the
> expansion of {{#property: to include the current value would be a
> work-around.
>
> We perhaps disagree about the priorities. I believe Wikipedia editors
> are not primarily keen on the technical definition of the diff as the
> changes of the wikitext of the database. I believe they want and need
> transparency about when an who changed a specific topic they care
> about.
>
> Gregor
>
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