MZMcBride wrote:
I think the issue we're seeing here is that changes, particularly large changes, often aren't socialized well.
I mention socialization of features as I'm not sure all of the context is apparent here. There are brooding factions on the English Wikipedia over infoboxes, apparently. I was reading about them yesterday. Risker, as a member of the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, will likely end up being tasked with helping sort out this mess. Wikidata may be exacerbating the general infobox issue, which is why socialization of a big new software feature like this is so important.
On any wiki, we often want to avoid inorganic growth/evolution. New features and developments are great, but over time. This is why most wiki communities oppose, for example, bot-created short articles (stubs).
From reading the technical village pump and visiting Wikidata, I don't
think the workflows are clearly established yet. Certainly not to the point that I'd want this in production on a huge wiki like the English Wikipedia. My strong recommendation would be to give the smaller Wikipedias some time to see how this works before going full-throttle. Perhaps one of the Wikimedia Foundation site architects can weigh in here.
MZMcBride