Hi all, I'm wondering about one usage Wikidata could be useful to Wikipedias : Redlinks subject identification.

Wikidata is good to identify subjects. Redlinks are used in Wikipedias to identify subjects with currently no article.

I post here because I think there is something to integrate this further, but I don't know exactly what.

A quick review about the current mechanisms we have to link items and/or articles and subjects together :

* Wikidata interwikis. This works well. Links an item to articles and articles titles

* articles redirect. This also works well, now we have a mechanism to link article redirects with items, which is cool.

* There is currently templates like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6519884 or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15977575 Interesting mechanisms actually

* Wikidata items aliases : links a set of lexemes to an item

* Special:ItemByTitle and Special:GoToLinkedPage which are great, I don't know how much they are used in practice though

A little bit different but close
* items redirects

This seems this covers a lot of the user usecases. Yet there is a lot of red links in Wikipedia with actually no links to a Wikidata item.

My feeling is that what actually lacks in this picture is that the templates are a bit hackish and that a deeper integration of item numbers with redlinks would allow to go further and encourage users to make the links at an earlier stage. What about a Wikisyntax to put an item number into a Wikilink or a visual editor integration to suggest an entity every time a user wants to enter a redlink ?

This seems a low hanging fruit for WIkidata development and could make Wikidata more real to Wikipedia communities. Especially compared to doing this at the community level where this would require a big maintenance effort and community knowledge about the templates to make the link beetween the red label and the corresponding item concrete, especially if visual editor make the information come to eveyone.

One other solution could be to allow to associate items to yet non existing articles to "reserve" them, allow redlinks into the Wikidata interwiki list ?