Hi Lydia,
The Dutch community (on the Dutch Wikipedia) had a voting in which was decided to get rid of all the interwikis on articles, categories, templates, project pages and help pages. The moving or removal of all interwikis has been completed a few days ago, with what we have tried to fix all the interwiki conflicts we found. We also have an active abuse filter that prevents users to add local interwikis to these pages.
Instead we actively communicate in person to every user that creates a new article which has not been added to Wikidata. We aim for that every article is added to Wikidata with a label in Dutch and at least the property
instance of. And for many subjects multiple statements.
With actively communicating to users that they should add their new article to Wikidata, the most heard reaction is that they did not know that it is good to have it added to Wikidata. The second most heard issue we hear is that they find it difficult to add articles to Wikidata (including adding statements).
For those users who were in the past used to add interwikis are now actively adding their articles to existing Wikidata items. This special page we use to found out which articles have been forgotten to add to (existing) items on Wikidata. I have a templated message that notes those users if they forgot to add their article to an existing item and reminds them that such is needed.
For users who are writing articles about typical Dutch subjects which are not expected to have an article in another language Wikipedia, it is new and I have a templated message that informs them why it is needed to create an item on Wikidata, tells them how to, and asks them to add some statements. We use the special page UnconnectedPages to see which articles have not been added yet to Wikidata.
Another group of pages we try to find with this special page are the ones that have been removed from an item without being added to an item.
The special pages makes it possible for me to just select with my mouse the list and then compare it in Autowikibrowser (still a pity we can't use AWB for items on Wikidata) to have see which of the unconnected pages is in which category, or which template, so we can groupewise add them to Wikidata.
So to conclude, this special page is essential for our work to get all the Wikipedia articles to Wikidata.
The adding, by the way, we like to to do by hand so that we can at least add some basic statements depending on the subject. Sometimes it is possible to use a tool to create items and add statements to a group of articles, but most of them are done by hand. (If it is done by bot/tool we get like 1000 items with only p17=q55, and that is as bad as nothing.) To do it by hand we make sure the most basic properties are added.
The biggest issue we face with using is that the page is not real time updated, and that pages that already are added to Wikidata are still in the list. We then have to do a nulledit on the article to get them removed from the list. Another delay are the articles that were removed from an item do not show up directly. (Was it removed correctly from that item or was it an error or vandalism? It requires a lot of searching to find that out, if it is found.)
Another subject we have, but we can work around it by just ignoring them, are those articles that are newly created and nominated for deletion as non encyclopaedic or too worse written to be kept. They are nominated for deletion. The procedure for this kind of articles is that they have a template on them which says they are nominated, and after 2 weeks an admin looks at them and judges if they should be kept, deleted or the nomination period is extended to give extra time to the writers/users to fix the issues. During this period of two weeks the article is on the special page of unconnected pages, of which a part is expected to be deleted. During these two weeks the articles nominated for deletion are making the special page a bit clumsy. (Maybe it is an idea to have magic word added to the deletion templates so that the articles that are nominated for deletion and not connected on Wikidata, show up at the bottom of the articles. I think those articles nominated for deletion should be on the special page, because I can imagine users would accidental add such magic word to the article and a magic word that would prevent being shown on the list is risky for abuse/mistakes. However, as most users start at the top of the special page, the pages nominated for deletion clutter on top of the special page as they are ignored.)
In the current special page besides articles (ns:0) also other namespaces are shown: Wikipedia, Templates, help pages, categories, portal pages, modules.
The problem with many pages in those sections are subpages. Examples: archive pages of discussion pages, /doc pages of templates, archive pages of our helpdesk, and subpages of portals are not needed to be added to Wikidata.
With categories have another issue: categories of an individual user, those should like user pages not be added to Wikidata.
I would recommend to have users see by default only articles (ns:0), but with a menu on top of this special page in what users can select the namespace they want to see, or the option all namespaces. (Like the recent changes have such option.)
I hope this gives some insight in how we use this special page. I am interested in what kind of changes you have in mind, and I hope we can still use the special page as we now do. Certainly as we do not have an real time alternative for it.
If there are any questions, just let me know.
Greetings,
Romaine