jesus fucking christ, it's like wikibase is designed to set me up to fail
the wikibase software is full of footguns like being unable to change the data types of properties or remove the bad properties (i can guess why that is, but it's still a pain); SPARQL syntax is an opaque, near-unreadable mess with piss-poor documentation; ShEx's documentation is seemingly aimed at computer science PhD's; there's no explanation on why scripts are disallowed; creating many similar items is a slow and tedious pain in the ass; and overall, this experience has sucked—R74n Wikibase itself doesn't suck, but the Wikibase software's user experience in general needs improvement.