Wikidata brought a massive improvement in quality at its start when it replaced the function of interwikilinks. A similar improvement is possible when Wikilinks are linked to Wikidata items.

Currently Wikilinks link to articles. most but not all those links have an associated link in Wikidata. When these links are associated to Wikidata it becomes easier to spot when homonyms are incorrectly associated. It becomes easier to add links between all the items associated with Wikilinks on an article.. This helps with the consistency of a subject. We could relate all items and show them in a "concept cloud" (see [1] for an example for Mr Obama). When such associations are made, it will also help to find differences in the articles involved.

When wikilinks are associated with items, it is not different from doing this for red links. Many of the red links will have items and by linking it is easy and obvious that an article is created when it is. All the other benefits for a Wikilink apply.

When links are treated in this way, it will also become much easier to produce lists. Any and all links may be generated and they will be associated with the data from Wikidata. Obviously, it is for a project to use it but there are 280+ Wikipedias and for the majority it will be a boon.

What this will also do is stimulate adding labels in Wikidata. Doing so will improve the usability of the data in Wikidata. Currently the labelling leaves much to be desired.

Wikipedians do not need to see anything of what happens here. If they do not care; fine, it does not matter. It is useful in its own right. When people do add a link, it can be associated in the background with items. For the people who do care about the relations between articles, it will provide an entire new playing field to learn what articles they have that is to be associated with the topic they care for.

In summary, adding items to links is relatively easy. It does not need to impact the existing workflow of Wikipedians. It will bring new tools to the front that will improve quality both in Wikidata and all associated projects.

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/cloudy_concept.php?q=Q76