I've been playing around with queries and noticed that some shadow posts are subclasses of Shadow Minister (Q20086425), and some of Shadow Secretary of State (Q20086417). For the moment I've defined one as a subclass of the other, but any idea the best way to handle this?
The target query, if you're interested, is this: all ministerial/shadow posts plus MP terms held by a single person (in this case May)
I know this part isn't your doing, but the connection to Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet (Q2579210) seems the wrong way around there (As the UK names the posts the opposite way to how many other countries do it — where usually where a "minister" is the senior post and "secretary" the junior one — I suspect there are quite a few other mislabellings, or bad instance of (P31) statements on the government side, never mind the opposition.)
I've never been quite sure how to set these all up, so have largely ignored them for now to concentrate on the actual cabinet, rather than the shadow one. But it would definitely be good to get a good approach for this hammered out. There should presumably also be some connection between the Shadow post and the "full" one, but I'm not sure we really have a suitable way to do that at the moment. My suspicion is that we probably want to find or create a suitable property to connect the role to the portfolio, rather than doing this through quite awkward subclassing.
I'll give it all some more thought.
"Not important right now" does seem fair enough :-). I've completely avoided worrying about ministries for the time being so I'm still a little hazy on how it's meant to work for them. And, yes, a "position shadows role" or similar would seem desirable. Do we have a generic "corresponds to" property, I wonder?
In terms of which item each specific position is a subclass of, the current shadow items look pretty much correct to me, though I'm increasingly wary of anything only being expressed through instance of (P31) or subclass of (P279). I think having the Shadow Secretary positions each be individually part of Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet (Q2579210) would be in keeping with the general approach, which is to have the cabinet-level positions each be part of the cabinet (e.g. Q3397406#P361). In theory that would let us also generate lists of who held each post during each instance of the shadow cabinet. I've added most of the ones I could find like this, and generated Wikidata:WikiProject every politician/United Kingdom/Shadow Cabinet/Q19972857 as an example (that's a generic template, though we'll need to factor that out to something slightly better at some point as I can't find a way to make it work with Listeria when a single person has held multiple positions in the same Cabinet.)
More generally, if we want to go deeply into the difference between junior Ministers and full-blown Cabinet Secretaries, we'll probably need to tease apart the individual Cabinets from their Ministries: currently for the UK there tends to be a single item representing the combination of those. For most things that's probably Good Enough™, but, if my understanding is correct, the junior ministers are only part of the Ministry, not the full Cabinet.