Hi!

For things that actually *are* free text, and not terribly long, a monolongual
(or, in the future, multilingual) text property could be used. "quote" already
exists, "abstract" could be added, pending community discussion. Length
limitations can be adjusted if need be.

Maybe if the need of bigger texts arises we can have separate field
type? Right now the storage model is not very good for storing texts of
non-negligible sizes, especially multilingual ones (x800 languages).
OTOH, we have a type that allows us to use multimedia by integrating
with Commons. So maybe the same idea with using some other wiki -
quotes? sources? for bigger text snippets would work too? Just
brainstorming here :)

What I was warning against is continuing the misuse of text fields for
semi-structured or even fully structured data that I have often seen in GLAM
meta-data. That kind of thing should not be copied to Wikidata.

Right. I think it may be useful here to understand which kinds of text
we're talking about which can't be structured but are big enough to
cause concern. I.e. if it's quotes - we already have wikiquote, right? Etc.