I've described this as "phasing out" because we're definitely not in a position to suddenly mark the relationship type as deprecated. The first step is to decide that this is something want to do. Then we can figure out the details and create smaller and more specific tickets for things.

Anyway:

We have links to Wikidata already. We can get Wikipedia links from Wikidata links. Dynamically fetching Wikipedia pages instead of storing Wikipedia links ourselves would reduce the maintenance burden.

Some examples of problems we currently have:

• We have a Japanese artist. We add links to the Japanese page and the English page. The English Wikipedia decides it's not notable enough and deletes the page. Now we have a broken link to detect and then remove. If we only linked to Wikidata and requested the list of Wikipedia pages from there, it would simply stop including the English page in the list after the English page was deleted.

• We link to a page for a song, let's call it "Ray of Light" since I can't remember a real example right now. Someone on Wikipedia moves the page to "Ray of Light (song)" and recreates "Ray of Light" as a redirect to "Ray (optics)". The page move triggers an update for the Wikidata item's Wikipedia link, so if we request the link from Wikidata, we'll get the correct link. Our direct link, however, is now incorrect because the page with that name now goes to a page about optics.

• Like the above, but imagine that the page was instead redirected to "Ray (disambiguation)". Now we're pointing at a disambiguation page instead, even though Wikidata has the right page.

• We link to a page about a person. Wikipedia decides they're not notable enough and redirects it to the group they're a member of. Wikidata, on the other hand, still has two separate items, because a person is not a group. In this case, as far as I can tell, Wikidata would still return the redirecting link, so it's not really better, but it's also not worse.

• We link to a page about a person. Someone moves the page to correct the spelling. This triggers an update of the Wikidata item, but we're still linking to a redirect. In this case, the redirect might not really be an issue... but how do we distinguish it from the above cases where the redirect is wrong and needs fixing?

The first question, assuming we do want to do this, is who is currently using the Wikipedia links?
I seem to recall that both the BBC and Google are using the English links for artists, but those are the only ones I can think of.
Are we using them? The only thing I can think of is the Wikipedia extracts, but we already use Wikidata there.