Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section

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EDITED Lead Page

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Hello, fellow Wikipedians! I have revised the lead page by summarizing key points and mentioning important aspects and sections of the article itself. I noticed in this article how there was a short lead in the section, and missing depth in the information; as I have also read the conversations above. Emooshka11 (talk) 04:46, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

No, you just vandalized the page by replacing part of it with sociology content. I reverted your change. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 05:37, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply
I apologize, but I don't understand. The article stated the lead page needed revision as there was a short summary. How do I edit without vandalizing? I do not see what I have done wrong here, as I am simply confused. Emooshka11 (talk) 19:19, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply
@Emooshka11, you edited the Manual of Style page to write about sociology. Look at your edit and compare it to the current page. Does that help you understand that you edited the wrong page? Schazjmd (talk) 19:54, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

(edit conflict)

Hi Emooshka11. I see that you are a student editor. This can all be very confusing for newbies here. I don't think you deliberately "vandalized" the page, but that was the effect. You deleted existing content and replaced it with a bunch of stuff about sociology. The WP:Manual of Style is not a Wikipedia article, but instructions for editors. It isn't about sociology. Maybe you accidentally copy-pasted the stuff in there? That can happen. You had just edited the History of sociology article, and maybe that stuff was on your clipboard and you accidentally left it here.

You need to constantly click that "history" tab to see what you have done, whether the result is what you intended, and any reactions to what you did. People will respond and leave edit summaries there. Try it now. Open the "project page" tab and look at its "history". Click on any relevant links (they are called "diffs" by editors). You will see your edit and my response. Then return here and respond to my comments here. I'll be happy to guide you through this. It's pretty overwhelming in the beginning. I have taught a college class about editing Wikipedia. During an assignment I gave the class, a group of girls got together and managed to use WP:Wikilinks to get far afield from what I intended. They got from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940), to engineering, to the engineering involved in bra design. That involved breasts, leading them to discover the huge amount of uncensored porn at Wikipedia. Their laughter alerted me to what was going on. We all got a good laugh.

BTW, I have written an essay about "lead": How to create and manage a good lead section (a how-to guide). An article's lead is a sensitive matter. Generally, no significant changes should be made to the lead unless there is a genuine need for it. That can occur when the body of the article has been enlarged or significantly changed. Changing a lead often requires quite a bit of knowledge about the whole article. Therefore, it's better to work on the body, rather than change the lead, at least while you are a newbie. Of course, minor copy edits to improve the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the lead are always welcome. That doesn't change the lead's summary of the whole article. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 20:00, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Citizenship in the lede

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We are having a debate on Talk:Stevie Wonder#Citizenship over his newly acquired dual citizenship status. It doesn't seem as though there is a standard to go by on how to refer to a person with dual citizenship; for instance Tina Turner lived in Switzerland for many years, yet she was not referred to as "American-Swiss". Also, Tom Hanks is American-Greek and this is not reflected in the lede. The infoboxes of these articles do point out additional citizenships, and I made sure this was the case on Stevie Wonder. However, several editors insist that his dual citizenship status must be mentioned in the lede despite him being an American citizen for almost the entirety of his life. dekema (Formerly Buffaboy) (talk) 05:24, 16 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

MOS:LEADLANG

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Thoughts on adding the proposed sentence (shown below in bold so editors can readily see the change):

Do not include foreign equivalents in the text of the lead sentence for alternative names or for particularly lengthy names, as this clutters the lead sentence and impairs readability. Do not include foreign equivalents in the lead sentence just to show etymology. Do not include in the text of the lead foreign equivalents written in non-Roman script, as this is unhelpful to the non-specialist reader. Foreign-language names should be moved to a footnote or elsewhere in the article if they would otherwise clutter the first sentence.[A]

Some examples where non-Roman script provides clutter to all readers, but probably helps only a very tiny minority of readers:

  • Districts (Sinhala: දිස්ත්‍රි‌ක්‌ක, romanized: Distrikka, Tamil: மாவட்டம், romanized: Māvaṭṭam) are the second level administrative divisions of Sri Lanka, preceded by provinces.
  • The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (also known as PIDE) ( ‏‎پاکستان دانشگاہِ ترقیاتی معاشیات) is a post-graduate research institute and a public policy think tank located in the vicinity of Islamabad, Pakistan.

These would be better as footnotes or moved elsewhere in the article, and not in the text of the lead. Thoughts? CUA 27 (talk) 20:02, 7 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Checking to see if anyone wants to weigh in? CUA 27 (talk) 12:46, 11 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

I don't think this change is necessary. There is nothing wrong with having a fairly short expression in another script in the lead sentence. Excessive cases are to be avoided, but that's common sense and doesn't need a particular rule. Plus the rule against clutter is already there. Gawaon (talk) 12:55, 11 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Worth implementing short description guidance, e.g. WP:SDNONE?

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While the mobile apps continue to terrorize the world by not making this at all visible to anyone using them, WP:SDNONE is effectively treated like a MOS guideline: we should probably mention it briefly, right? Remsense 20:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

Guideline on citations in the lede

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This guideline is a horrible idea. It radically decreases transparency and greatly weakens the verifiability requirement. Editors and readers are expected to either just trust the implicit anonymous claim that every single assertion found in the lede is sourced somewhere in the article, or else read the entire article, which may be very long, just to find where the claim in question and its sourcing could possibly be located. This makes verification far more difficult than under normal circumstances. Given how often unsourced information is added, incorrect conclusions are made from sources, sources are misrepresented (unconsciously or not) or are unreliable, making part of the article - and the most prominent and important one to boot! - extremely difficult to verify is a horrible idea. The benefit is unclear - adding a few citations in the lede, even if they are also found in the body of the article, is not difficult and does not harm readability significantly - and certainly can't compensate for the harm caused. 'Just trust us, it's there somewhere' is an unacceptable principle for an encyclopedia whose articles are produced collectively and anonymously.

Locating the source might be easier when there is an editor that monitors the article constantly, is very familiar with its content and structure and can point the user demanding a citation to the right place in the article body. This may be the true in some cases, but it normally isn't and our official guidelines cannot be based on the assumption that it always is. It also requires the user who placed the tag to take the extra steps of coming back to the article and having a conversation with the editor in question before they can even check whether the source is reliable and says what it is cited for, and the user cannot be reasonably expected to do that each time. Anonymous44 (talk) 12:52, 24 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

I don't feel similarly about this guideline, but I do note that inexperienced editors will frequently add new information (sometimes cited) directly to the lead rather than under a more appropriate subheading, possibly because the "edit lead section" icon is so prominent in comparison to the rest. By consequence, in practice this guideline is rarely followed except at well-established and stable articles. Folly Mox (talk) 14:15, 24 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
The lead is meant to be a summary of the rest of the article. If it has its own citations and referecing, the possibilities of original research and/or synthesis increase 10 fold. But as FM says above, this is a rather "late-stage" guideline, which (in practice) is really only applied to rather well written articles. – Aza24 (talk) 18:02, 26 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
I disagree totally, echoing points above. Moreover, contrary to your vibe check, when this guideline is actually considered or enforced, it only ever makes articles better. To me, it's not really under question that summary paragraphs of cited material do not require their own inline citations. I will also insist that a requirement would mostly result in lazy, less helpful, distracting, and misleading citations. Moreover, it would result in worse prose, as editors would be more likely just to copy-paste to ensure their summary doesn't need to grab citations from anywhere else in the article.
Think about it like this: when this guideline is invoked, it has the effect of making editors look the lead over, and reconsider how well it represents the article as a whole. A much better article usually results from this. Remsense 07:36, 31 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Remsense here. Something that's in the lead without being expanded upon (and sourced) in the body can usually be challenged and removed on that reason alone. The lead is meant to be a summary of the main points of the body, therefore in theory it would never need any references of its own (direct quotes exempted). Gawaon (talk) 09:37, 31 July 2024 (UTC)Reply


Cite error: There are <ref group=upper-alpha> tags or {{efn-ua}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=upper-alpha}} template or {{notelist-ua}} template (see the help page).