Why is there a spinner? Link application is instant.

True, and we still want it to feel fast.
But when we first tested the prototype, users were surprised by the instant result. Some people said "Did someone else already link this?" Because we're automatically linking for the user instead of having them type something in, we should tell them thats what we are doing.

Both James and I have talked through this with design before, and the approach we are going with is to show a notification in the link inspector that the link has been created successfully. Showing a bogus spinner to convince the user something is happening is a really bad UX pattern. Notifying the user that something has happened solves the problem in a superior way.

Please provide design work that reflects these conversations.

Could you provide an example or explain notification further?

As a product decision, we decided to remove this as a blocker to the release, and instead focus on the citation improvements first before taking this on. Consequently, we decided to remove this from the Q3 blockers list at the triage meeting on 2015-02-11.

Blockers resolved; this is now "just" a question of getting the image and Wikidata description and filling it in. Potentially relatively easy.

The query to do this is as follows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Lorem%20ipsum|Barack%20Obama&prop=pageterms|pageimages&wbptterms=description&uselang=de

(with thanks to the Mobile Apps team). Will need to be cached etc.