Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section

Transclusions

I moved the “Link to subarticle” section into the “Elements”, since it precedes the Lead paragraph. I also made “Lead sentence format” a subsection of “Lead sentence”.

Obviously, the transclusion scheme interferes with such edits which are not restricted to a single transcluded section. Sorry. A bit of clean-up is still required. I suggest that these guidelines specific to the lead section be linked from elsewhere, instead of appearing in two places. If you must transclude two adjacent sections, then put them in a single page, so at least they can be edited together. —Michael Z. 2009-01-14 22:08 z

Spoilers

There does not seem to be any mention of whether spoilers or plot material should be included in the lead. I feel it is wholly counter to the goals of the encyclopedia to include outright spoilers in the lead section. As it stands virtually every article I've ever read has a simple, spoiler-free plot summary, but now I am seeing that contested by self-rightous editors who plug their ears and waving a "no deleting spoilers because they are spoilers" sign. Readers expect to be able to comfortably read the lead of an article without having an essential plot point or twist ruined for them. It is perfectly acceptable and appropriate to include spoilers in the body of the article, but certainly not in the lead. Readers should be able to peruse the lead with the same comfort as a review or the summary on the back of a DVD or novel - a general summary to provide an idea of the content, not an outright declaration of the intricate twists and turns of the story. Some guy (talk) 09:12, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

For context: Talk:Watchmen#Spoiler in the lead and Wikipedia: Spoiler. WesleyDodds (talk) 11:55, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Position of protection tags?

Alright, so the Elements of the Lead section states that maintenance boxes should come after disambiguation links, but does this include the full-size protection templates (such as {{pp-dispute}})? I ask because I recently brought up the question at Talk:Barack Obama, not having found a particular guideline or policy which states whether protection templates are an exception. It'd be nice if there were a clarification in this guideline if necessary. Thanks! —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 03:26, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

In my experience protection templates, such as the one above, are placed directly at the top of the article. Besides looking better (see here), placement directly at the top draws immediate attention to the article's situation. KnightLago (talk) 03:43, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Specifying the length of the lede

Any problems? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Lead_section&curid=526968&diff=276631861&oldid=276631604 It should be lower, as those are high numbers.

I don't necessarily have any objections to the lengths proposed. I am wondering, however, if there is truly a problem that needs to be addressed. I see that this topic has been discussed numerous times in the past ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]) in one way or another, but the topic does not appear to carry a great deal of urgency. How big a problem do we consider this to be? Is there more of a problem with overly-long or with overly-short leads? Just some thoughts. Unschool 01:46, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Meaning of "Lead"?

Does anyone know what this means exactly? "The lead serves as both an introduction to the article, and as a summary of the important aspects of the article's topic." SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 18:38, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking someone else would have answered by now. The meaning is that the lede has two purposes:

• It provides a concise summary of the entire article. If you only read the lede you should at least have a sense of all the major points that will be covered. In this sense it serves like an abstract.
• It is also the first section that a reader sees, so it also serves as an introduction by placing the topic in context, orienting the reader to the material, and foreshadowing the rest of the article.

Of course these can support each other, but occasionally articles go too far in either direction – they can leave too much out of the lede in an attempt to be introductory, or ignore all introduction and assume the reader is already familiar with the topic. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Citations/refs in the Lead

A perennial problem that causes some unnecessary controversy is the use of refs in the lead, which can sometimes make a lead rather bulky and clumsy. We need leads that create a good first impression, leads that are clean and simple.

Currently this policy has a section about how to use citations in the lead, and it contains this sentence:

"There is not, however, an exception to citation requirements specific to leads."

I'd like to start a discussion about this practice, and it will likely require a change of the policy(ies) related to this. I think we can manage just fine without a long list of links in the lead. I think we can keep it to a minimum.

Let me start with some basic presuppositions. If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will point it out ;-):

1. The lead must summarize all significant content.

2. That content is already properly sourced, or it shouldn't be in the body of the article, and therefore there is no need for duplication of the refs in the lead.

3. To summarize the content efficiently, everything that deserves a heading should be mentioned very shortly in the LEAD.

4. Long and important sections may deserve several sentences, and short ones may only deserve a sentence or phrase.

This leads to a fifth point as my suggested improvement:

5. Every phrase, sentence, or group of sentences in the lead that summarizes a section, should contain only one ref that points to that section. This would ensure that all significant content is mentioned, and eliminate all doubt about which content is being discussed. It would also make it easier to update the lead when content is changed.

I think we could clean things up by specifically eliminating any requirement for citations to external sources in the lead. Instead we could use internal links to sections as refs in the LEAD. These refs would not appear in the references section near the bottom, but would just hop back and forth between the lead and the article section using <A HREF="#spot"> tags.

-- Brangifer (talk) 01:30, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

We'll need those refs to avoid people thinking it's unreferenced.-NootherIDAvailable (talk) 03:43, 1 May 2009 (UTC)