You’re reading that on a different level. Hopefully, humans won’t have to search for brand:wikidata=Q524757 to find KFCs nearby! But for a computer, that should be the best way to find KFCs nearby, if it knows some terms related to that Wikidata entry (e.g. “KFC”, “Kentucky Fried Chicken”, …).
The problem of all KFC restaurants being or not tagged with brand:wikidata is a different one. And that’s not to say that tagging all restaurants with their correct brand:wikipedia, when available, is the only way to improve the situation.
Right.
It’s possible I misunderstood you, but: how?
If an hypothetical search system knows that “KFC” is a common term to mean Q524757, then restaurants tagged with brand:wikidata=Q524757 should show up in the results, whether restaurants are locally tagged with name=KFC or not (or other similar variants).
OTOH, if you search for “Kentucky” alone in that hypothetical search system, restaurants tagged with name=Kentucky should show up in the results as well, whether or not they are also tagged with brand:wikidata=Q524757.
Does that make sense? If I’m thinking clearly and managed to explain myself clearly, it should be easy to understand that this approach works globally for both locals and non-locals.
Anyway, the thread is under “Tagging general discussion”, but this is not a tagging problem, is it?