I didn't know about the VisualEditor initiative, but I use the wikEd gadget that you can enable under your preferences for the English Wikipedia. It makes links to images clickable while editing, among other things. If we could get a similar experience to link to a Wikidata item that could be a good first step.
> Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:51:43 +0100
> From: nemowiki@gmail.com
> To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] The experience for (local project) editors, post-Phase 2
>
> Steven Walling, 29/03/2013 19:39:
> > The thread is at:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Wikidata_phase_2_is_coming_soon
>
> Doesn't seem to be en.wiki-related, so I'll reply here: "normal users"
> are not able to edit infoboxes anyway, so Wikidata is the first step to
> make infobox data more easily editable: we're already seeing this with
> interwiki links (except for Commons, whose situation worsened because
> it's outside the circle).
> There was a time when we thought Semantic MediaWiki with its forms (or
> other hacky forms) were the way, but probably Wikidata will be serving
> this purpose too.
>
> Nemo
>
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