Wrapping it in an empty statement is OK if the value is not set, but the whole concept of having a property, `notes` which contains a periodical number is quite odd to me.

The previous implementation has much less WTF-factor.

I do not know if we can resolve this easily. Browsing through GitHub I could not find the place here notes is set but perhaps each item could have an optional periodical id and we could refer to that if set?

At the very least some kind of comment would be nice.