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.
> From: g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 15:53:43 +0200
> To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Page history and properties
>
> My concern is, that the Wikidata editors, those not with random
> editing behavior, but those who are curators/caretakers of specific
> pages, experience a disempowerment, because they loose control.
>
> I view the decision to inform about wikidata changes only in the
> short-lived recentchanges, but not in the page history, as
> problematic. Page editors will now be informed that the page has
> changes, but this change is not recorded in the page history, and it
> cannot be seen in the version-diffs. This is breaking a lot of
> assumptions of trust. Wikipedia can be be collaborative because of
> this trust in the versioning system and because of the accessibility
> with reasonable, of the version-diffs (transparency).
>
> Some editors will probably leave the Wikipedia project due to the
> introduction of Wikidata, no matter how much Wikidata reaches out to
> them. I feel that the number is much higher in the present
> "disempowerment" implementation, which is why I try to argue here for
> making content changes that come from Wikidata and affect Wikipedia
> pages transparent on Wikipedia, not only Wikidata.
>
> This discussion is about proposing potential elements and ideas; there
> may be much better ideas. I am not convinced by the arguments against
> the proposed means: I fear the thinking is a programmers thinking, not
> a content editor thinking. Denny, I feel that your proposal that some
> html-version archiving somewhere, which is not integrated into the
> wikipedia editing workflow, does not take sufficient care of the needs
> of the editors, especially the need to be able to use the version
> comparison, not just find rendered versions somewhere in isolation.
>
> But neither of us can see into the future. I think Wikidata is a great
> achievement as it is, and we all agree that it can be made better by
> better integration into existing Wikipedia workflows. Let us focus on
> the importance of this and try to find the best means that are
> achievable with existing resources.
>
> Gregor
>
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