Hey,

> Why this is better?

Because it does not force knowledge of a specific serialization format onto the entity object and does not prevent constructing it from its composited-in parts.

Note that this is about the PHP codebase of Wikibase. It has no impact on the users of the software, such as Wikidata.org.

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com
Software craftsmanship advocate
Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3