On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:54 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
As explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Wikidata_Phase_... the most recent consensus on English Wikipedia is that, regardless of data type, the community only supports including material from Wikidata when it doesn't already exist in Wikipedia. Basically that means that the status quo on enwiki is that you're not allowed to replace local data with references to Wikidata, in any part of article content or templates.
(Getting a bit OT and we may want to move that particular thread to the relevant on-wiki page.)
I remember that RFC, and that was not my interpretation - rather, I interpret it as saying:
1) It's fine to go ahead and modify Template:Infobox_country to pull {{{capital}}} from Wikidata provided a locally specified value overrides the Wikidata one (this can be done at the template level by checking whether a value has been set for a given parameter).
2) It's fine to cautiously start removing explicit value specifications for the {{{capital}}} parameter in pages that call {{Infobox country}}.
Admittedly, 2) is a bit ambiguous in the RFC; Marc-Andre as the closer may be able to clarify whether I got it right.
But if you look at {{Infobox country}}'s actualy parameters, you'll see that very many of them cannot be represented in Wikidata currently.
You're spot on regarding the UX issues of course, but there's also a UX benefit while the majority of editing is still done in wikitext -- getting rid of parameter/value clutter simplifies the wikitext for users who have no interest in infobox editing.
Erik