Hi!
For example, this
article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Frost_House has a nice
public domain photo that someone contributed back in 2010, but it's not
referenced from Wikidata
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7964895
Why couldn't these all be referenced automatically?
Many articles contain multiple images, which may or may not be the one
we want to see as "main image" for the item. E.g. this article:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Schellino has a number
of images, but none of them are suitable to be "image" for
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3766751. So some human involvement is
necessary.
And, of course, there are copyright questions. Wikidata technically does
not contain the images, only links to them, so it may or may not be
important, but those links should be to Commons, and not every image in
Wikipedia articles are from commons, some are local on wikis and can not
be imported to Commons for various reasons.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org