What's the point of this with the current high quality of state-of-the-art machine translation? Don't we expect machine translation to surpass humans in the near future?

People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. They should just edit the articles in natural language.

A lot of the content of Wikidata isn't numbers and is natural language also, so you'd still need to (machine?) translate it. But this time the machine translation algorithm would not have the benefit of the long-term context from the encompassing paragraph.

There are too many reasons why this is a bad idea. Almost makes me mad.