Hoi, The two biggest technical changes that had a huge impact on all our projects were first Commons and then Wikidata. Commons centralised pictures in one location and this saved Wikimedia a huge amount in storage costs. Wikidata centralised all the interwiki links in one database and it stopped the biggest generator of edits in all the Wikipedias.
I have toying with the idea of combining each Wikipedia with its own Wikibase. It will improve the functionality of both blue and red links. Disambiguation will be improved. It enables synchronisation with Wikidata. We link to the OpenLibrary where books can be read by an international public. Books and scholarly papers will be known at Wikidata as well enabling the signalling of retractions and citations.
I blogged about this and a more complete expose can be read..
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-red-wikibase-for-red-blue-and... https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-red-wikibase-disambiguation-o... https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2024/03/another-red-application-epidemi... https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-red-approach-to-wikipedia-ref...
What do you think, what is not to like? Thanks, GerardM