I'd say "could work", not "would work" --- linking wikidata items to phrases is potentially quite problematic. You'd have to select the proper item for the part of speech (for example, the wikidata item corresponding to the article is probably the *noun*, not the *verb*; I'm not sure verbs are represented at all in wikidata currently), and then you'd also potentially have to conjugate the item correctly when inserting it into context (as a simple example, see https://github.com/airbnb/polyglot.js#pluralization -- you'd have to select the correct text corresponding to the number of items in the context).
I like the idea, though. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Amazing_Article_Annotations might be a better approach, though -- basically, create a proper machine translation service from variant A to variant B and let it handle conversions after editing.