I have great concerns about this.
There is important information in qualifiers and references that is used on the clients and we need to be showing this to editors on client wikis if they are changing.
I think we really need to focus on not injecting changes that don't affect the article instead of not propagating whole classes of edits.

In T401286#11077300, @Lydia_Pintscher wrote:

I have great concerns about this.
There is important information in qualifiers and references that is used on the clients and we need to be showing this to editors on client wikis if they are changing.
I think we really need to focus on not injecting changes that don't affect the article instead of not propagating whole classes of edits.

I hope this could be only a stop-gap until T401290: Implement new usage types for qualifiers and references is resolved.

Do you have numbers on how often it's used? There will be always changes that won't be notified (page is not watched, noone checks RC, etc.) but what is the trade off of the impact vs loss of notification and this is responsible for large portion of notifications.

Temporarily I think I could live with, yeah.

Yes, this is a temporary measure while we investigate and implement a more sustainable fix

Change #1178567 had a related patch set uploaded (by Joely Rooke WMDE; author: Joely Rooke WMDE):

[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Abort change propagation to client wikis for reference and qualifier only changes

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1178567

Change #1178567 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Abort change propagation to client wikis for reference and qualifier only changes

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1178567

Change #1185063 had a related patch set uploaded (by Neslihan Turan; author: Neslihan Turan):

[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Hot fix for T401288 and T401286 to work together.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1185063

The data is way too spiky so I have to let a long time pass to say more accurately but have this for now. A quick comparison showed a 23% reduction in RC injected by Wikidata. I think the longer term value is actually higher.