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Jargon. What does it mean, and why isn't it explained in the title? Thank you. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 01:13, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
The term "lede" was deleted from this guideline, with consensus, for a reason. Why is it back in?
They are complete opposites. People not understanding this and writing Wikipedia leads as if they were journalistic ledes is a frequent, growing and decidedly non-trivial problem. By including "lede" as an alternative term for "lead" here, we are directly encouraging journalism-style abuse of the lead in Wikipedia articles. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 20:49, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
[D]ictionaries say that the term 'lede' is only used in News journalism, and the overall information appears to be that it is only applied to a particular style of introduction that is specific to News. News style ledes have a particular length, around 25 words, and you have to apply to 5 specific criteria. Our leads are nearly always longer than that and not all of those criteria are applicable for us either. In addition the style of a lede is unencyclopedic. Rememberway ( talk) 05:46, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
"Lede" and "lead" are the same word, just spelled differently to avoid confusion with the element Pb. The fact that the same word may have different meanings in different contexts is well established in English. Here is what I said about it sometime in 2011:
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:23, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
As far as I can tell "lede" was inserted into the lede of this page after this discussion in September 2010, in which there was clear consensus to include it. Looking through the history, it seems that the stable state of the page since then has been to include "lede" in the lede. So the claim that there is consensus to remove it does not seem so strong; if there ever was such consensus, the discussion in September 2010 and the stability in the 18 months since then seem to have superseded it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:04, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Also, it is not the point of a journalistic lede to hide information to convince the reader to read the rest of the article. News articles are meant to be written in an inverted pyramid style so that the reader can stop reading at any point without missing any more important information than they have already read, and so that editors can cut off paragraphs from the bottom if the story needs shortened. Compare News_style#Lead_.28or_lede.29_or_intro. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:13, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
[O]thers have contradicted this claim before: Perhaps the most salient comment from the previous version of this discussion:
[D]ictionaries say that the term 'lede' is only used in News journalism, and the overall information appears to be that it is only applied to a particular style of introduction that is specific to News. News style ledes have a particular length, around 25 words, and you have to apply to 5 specific criteria. Our leads are nearly always longer than that and not all of those criteria are applicable for us either. In addition the style of a lede is unencyclopedic.
Rememberway ( talk) 05:46, 17 May 2011 (UTC)I.e., reliable sources clearly indicate that they are different words, not alternative spellings for the same thing, and that lede is a jargon term exclusive to news journalism, which Wikipedia is not.
On Dictionaries: Oxford English Dictionary (searched online) does not include "lede" in this sense (only in 3 senses marked as "Obsolete" including "A people, nation, race. Also, persons collectively, ‘people’."). It is not included in Chambers Dictionary (1998) in any sense. We should not be using it Wikipedia. Pam D 09:16, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
It was demanded of me to demonstrate consensus against "lede". Be careful what you wish for. Here's over five non-stop hours of research, reading and commentary, compressed down into quotes and observations, presented in chronological order (and skipping the ongoing version of the debate at WT:Manual of Style/Lead section#A lead is not a lede, since it's right here and you don't have to dig in archives for it. Depending on your reading speed it should take 10 minutes or so to plow through. I wrote it as I was going, so it's a rapid-fire braindump, and probably has a bunch of typos. I'll clean it up and put it in a separate page for future reference, since I'm sure people will try to editwar "lede" back into the guideline again.
Analysis of previous "lede" debates
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Analysis of previous "lede" debates
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Conclusion: It is patently clear that only a WP:False consensus was made to add it back in, reached by less than 24 hours of discussion, involving !votes by no one but five fans of the term (everyone else had already said their piece and moved on, almost uniformly against), that did not provide a single sound rationale for the reversion of its previous long-standing removal, which was arrived at after a much longer discussion (i.e., an actual consensus, especially taking into account the general revulsion that dates to 2006, and rose to a strong tide in 2008). It's not been re-addressed until now because most people DGaF and have not noticed the correlation between the rise of "lede" being prominently used in this guideline and the increase in crappy lead sections that mirror newspaper or magazine style (or sometimes, awfully, both).
So, good luck demonstrating consensus to keep this confusing, misleading and strife-generating term in the guideline. I "rest my case", "QED", etc.
— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 20:45, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
All I can say is essentially what I have said before: I don't think it really matters whether the term is in the first sentence of the MOS Really: I don't think it really matters and I have no plans to re-insert it if it is removed, just as I was not the one who re-inserted it in 2010 [3] and I will not be the one to re-insert it when it is removed again after it is added again in a few months.
I do think that the long arguments presented in the collapsed box above provide a nice example of how English prescriptivism can work in the context of the MOS, and that these arguments are generally as full of content as the standard arguments against ending sentences with prepositions. We know how long people have maintained that particular bugbear, so it's not too surprising that those who are uncomfortable with "lede", for whatever reason, will find reasons not to like it, even while those who are comfortable with it find those reasons lacking. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:37, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
Can the standard for the lead paragraph be changed to include an anchor?
Wikipedia is the natural home for glossary information required by other websites. Rather than building their own glossaries, web authors should be able to link directly to Wikipedia. However the critical information in a Wikipedia article is in the lead sentence, and I can find no way to link directly to that paragraph the way I can link to the following sections in the article. That omission may be unimportant when an author uses an endnotes style of glossary references, but it makes using Wikipedia difficult for authors to use frames to provide footnotes that can be read simultaneously with the page using the defined term.
For example, if I am writing a page that discusses Aristotle's concept of causality, I can use the URI " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Aristotle" in a link, with a target of MyFootnoteFrame and the Wikipedia article on causality will open in that frame directly at that section. But if I use the URI " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality" the article opens at the top of the page with (today) three inches of page space before the lead sentence. For the purpose of putting footnotes in a compact frame, that effect is quite undesirable.
I tried adding '<span id="Def"/>' to the lead sentence (I now think '<span id="Topic"/>' would have been better), but that was remove (by Izno) as "unstandard".
So what is the standard practice, or what should be the standard practice, to enable authors to point directly to the lead sentence? What should be the standard URI (URL + # + anchor) to that sentence? Should a shortcut template be added so that users can obtain the URI? What instructions should be placed in this MOS article to guide Wikipedia editors in entering lead paragraph anchors? Is it possible that such anchors (and shortcuts) could be generated automatically?
Since I am in the process of building a website that requires a good glossary that I can present in a footnotes frame, I would appreciate some guidance. Should I put my efforts in upgrading Wikipedia to serve this need, or should I write my own glossary that simply links to Wikipedia? DrFree ( talk) 17:00, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia seems to crave images. I help out at the Graphic Lab and I'm often amazed by the seeming desparation to get more images onto Wikipedia, as evidenced by the sheer volume of low-quality images uploaded for want of a better image. (Where no image would be preferable, IMO.) And then there's pages like the Main Page and Portal pages that are as ugly as sin. Forgive my nostalgia but when I was a child I used to read encyclopedias for fun, and the images and diagrams were intrinsic to that experience. I'd like to see Wikipedia change drastically in terms of graphical content. Not just thumbnails everywhere but some sort of modern day illumination, with greater freedom of expression possible, making WP a more appealing read. By way of an example, what does anyboby think of this mockup of a graphical page header? (Further links are in the image description.) Any comments would be appreciated. Regards, nagualdesign ( talk) 15:46, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Your illustration is lovely, and would work somewhat well for a small number of pages on wikipedia. There are, you're right, many low quality images on wikipedia, but I'd prefer a LQI to no image: information first, aesthetics second. YMMV, of course. There are few arguments against a desire to improve the quality and layout of images on wikipedia; but there are also limitations that you need to take on board; not least that we serve multiple platforms across a range of connection types - including restricted bandwidth connections. This is why, for instance, we use thumbnails: we prioritise small size over aesthetics. You are showing no evidence in your post of any other consideration but aesthetics. So. It'd be great if we could improve the look of wikipedia, but we - you - need to understand all the use cases before you charge ahead. Here's a pair: how do these things - for instance your lovely mock-up - work for partially sighted users, or on screen readers? -- Tagishsimon (talk) 20:01, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
That mockup looks brilliant. Nagualdesign, I hope you have not goven up because of Tagishimon. The problems he and others mentions will only be encountered if poor.y implemented and can be easily avoided. I really appreciate your enthusaism and I think that graphic artists are not given due credit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.66.202.85 ( talk) 04:57, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
I was wondering if the lead section on the World Expo 88 was adequate. The article contains 26,566 characters and has a 2 paragraph lead. I added the Lead too short template last year. It hasn't been expanded since and has now been removed from the article by User:Pmsyyz, who has been removing the template from articles when the lead is clearly too short. I have asked him to stop doing that but he continues to remove the template regardless. Can I get some clarification? - Shiftchange ( talk) 06:07, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
Yugoslavia does not "refer to" such and such. It "was", rather, such and such. This is not a dictionary. I'd be interested in knowing what percent of articles in English Wikipedia start with this flawed phrase. It really should be focused on in the style manual. The phrase "refers to" suggests the article is to be about the word or term that is the title of the article. However, this is in the vast majority of Wikipedia articles not at all the case.
In Wiktionary, it would be a fairly good way to start an article, using this "refers to" expression. In Wikipedia, however, it is in most cases simply nonsense. The topic of articles here in Wikipedia are in almost all cases about a topic that the title "refers to" ... not about the article title words themselves. Which is to say, this article should not start out by focusing on the word "Yugoslavia" (which it does as it is now), but should instead focus simply on Yugoslavia. The article should not at all begin with talking about what Yuguslavia "refers to", but should instead start out by saying that Yugoslavia "was" a series of political entities and so on. I hope it won't be too many years until the administrators finally realize how silly it looks how so many articles start out with this "refers to" silliness. Please take this topic to your leaders, guys. :-) It's been a blemish on Wikipedia for years. -- 31.45.79.44 ( talk) 03:01, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
There's a discussion on Talk:2011 Tucson shooting/GA1 that descriptive titles should not be in bold. The wording that descriptive titles should not appear in boldface was introduced in 2008. It is interesting that most of the examples given in WP:SBE, a supporting essay, do show the descriptive title in bold. I suspect that the wording might be more appropriate as it was previously - "it need not be in boldface". These featured articles use bold type for descriptive titles: Yellowstone fires of 1988, Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident, July 2009 Ürümqi riots, Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It seems inappropriate for a guideline to be so strongly imposing a preference which is widely ignored. I would welcome a move back to "need not". Thoughts? SilkTork ✔Tea time 11:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
"Need not be" is certainly better than "should not be." I haven't seen a good explanation of why "should not be" makes sense, and there are many examples where "descriptive" titles work very well in bold. Another problem with this rule is the use of the word "descriptive." Hopefully all our titles are descriptive, but the rule seems to try to distinguish between titles that are "merely descriptive" (used a few paragraphs above the rule) and some other type of title. I doubt that this is useful distinction, but if it is to be used we should try to describe it better. Probably a better approach would be to write something like: "Some titles may be difficult to use verbatim in the first sentence and need not be bolded." That takes care of the 0.1% of titles where bolding seems awkward, and doesn't impose anything on the 99.9% of titles where bolding seems quite natural. Smallbones ( talk) 18:26, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
The article's title is stated as early as possible in the first sentence, and placed in bold:
The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. ( Electron)
The inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre were held in AD 80. ( Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre)
Only the first occurrence of the title, along with significant alternative titles is placed in bold:
Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. ( Mumbai)
If the article title does not lend itself to being used easily and naturally in its entirety in the opening sentence, then it does not need to appear exactly word by word, and the individual words do not need to be in bold:
The exact nature of Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) of China is unclear. ( Tibet during the Ming Dynasty)
If an article's title is a formal or widely accepted name for the subject, display it in bold as early as possible in the first sentence:
The electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. ( Electron)
Otherwise, include the title if it can be accommodated in normal English:
The inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre were held in AD 80. ( Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre)
Only the first occurrence of the title and significant alternative titles are placed in bold:
Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. ( Mumbai)
If the article's title does not lend itself to being used easily and naturally in the opening sentence, the wording should not be bent in an effort to include it:
The 2011 Mississippi River floods were a series of floods affecting the Mississippi River in April and May 2011, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
Instead, simply describe the subject in normal English, avoiding unnecessary redundancy:
The Mississippi River floods in April and May 2011 were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
If the article's exact title is absent from the first sentence, do not apply the bold style to segments that do appear:
The Beatles' rise to prominence in the United States on February 7, 1964 was a significant development in the history of the band's commercial success. ( The Beatles in the United States)
1. Bold title without link:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
2. Useful link without bold:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
My feeling is that if people have arrived on a page regarding "history of the Americas", then reassurance that they have arrived at the right page for that topic is more vital than immediately linking words in the title. In the example given, DragonHawk has recently written an elegant solution, in which the term Americas is defined in proximity to the use of the term: "The history of the Americas (North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean) begins...", which is in line with WP:EXPLAINLEAD. If the word is important to the topic, it will shortly be mentioned again, and on second use can be linked. If the word is obvious, then it doesn't need linking on first use if it contradicts with the bolding rule. If it is not obvious, then a brief summary is more useful than a link. I think we are all familiar with the "next link quest", where you are on a page, and are taken through a succession of links and pages in order to get a reasonable summary of a concept, and you end up far from where you started. While I do enjoy such serendipitous browsing, I would like an option regarding initiating such a search: give a basic summary, enough for understanding of the topic in hand, and provide a link for further detail at the earliest convenience. The link should not be vital to understanding. It should always be an option. SilkTork ✔Tea time 10:59, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
1. Bold title without link:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
2. Useful link without bold:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
3. Bold title with summary explanation in brackets:
The history of the Americas ( North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean) begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
I'm sorry to chime in late here, but this is the first I've noticed these changes. I have some concerns about this section as it now stands. Substantially, the indeterminance of whether to bold that was once contingent upon whether a title was merely "descriptive" seems only to have been displaced onto whether a title can be fit acceptably into a sentence, which seems an assessment at least as disputable as whether a title is merely descriptive. I suggest that the "descriptive" concept is good, but should be refined. Notably, re the primacy of linking versus bolding, I would suggest that the relevance of linking correlates with whether titles would be bolded under this standard because articles titled like "(event) of (location)" naturally benefit from linking (event) and (location) and would generally be characterized as "descriptive" and unbolded, and thus this criterion often obviates choosing between bold or links, which seems an important benefit given the fundamental nature of the bold-vs-link editing conflict. Perhaps the test for bolding should be whether the topic has a common name, per WP:COMMONNAME? Still imperfect, certainly, but it is very much a tried and relied upon criterion and one fairly complementary to the "descriptive" standard already in use.
Also, I advise that the examples provided be illustrated as in use, consistent with wiki-linking:
The 2011 Mississippi River floods were a series of floods affecting the Mississippi River in April and May 2011, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
The Mississippi River floods in April and May 2011 were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
I suggest that this display also demonstrates that, as to the raised matter of concern about being on the desired topic, the leading links guide the eye to the topic at hand, much as bold does. The title itself at the top of the page can easily be referred to as well, if titular verification is desired, or if a topic is too broad be effectively described there then the first sentence defines the article's scope, if crafted appropriately per MOS:LEAD. This display also demonstrates that even the fitting-in-a-sentence standard still leaves many articles without bold, and to the extent that the lack of bold is a problem, this standard does so in a pattern that is actually harder to anticipate than that of the "descriptive" standard, and thus would seem only to exacerbate concern about not being on the desired topic if bold text is not encountered.
I propose changing the guidelines to advise bolding if a topic has a common name, which is similar to but more specific than advising against bolding for a merely "descriptive" title. ENeville ( talk) 21:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
There is a request for comment concerning citations in the lead of the Hydraulic fracturing article. Beagel ( talk) 10:37, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
Currently this guideline says:
Although Wikipedia's naming convention guidelines recommend the use of English, there are instances where the subject of an article is best known in English-speaking sources by its non-English name. In this case, the non-English title may be appropriate for the article.
This paragraph is wrong at many levels. First "naming convention guidelines" is wrong it should be "the Article titles policy"
"English speaking sources" I think what that means is "reliable English language sources" unless we are only using verbal sources such as radio broadcasts as sources.
If a subject is best known with a certain spelling in reliable English language sources then that spelling is not a "non-English name" but the English name of that subject.
Every article has to have a title and what that title should be is decided by the Article titles policy. This is described and made reasonably clear earlier in this guideline (eg under WP:LEADSENTENCE). By the time one comes to write the lead for the article whether the name is one used in reliable English language sources, or a name taken from reliable foreign language sources (because "there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage" WP:UE) does not alter how it should appear in the first sentence (whether or not the name in the lead comes from reliable English language sources, or reliable foreign language sources, how it is handled regarding bold etc is exactly the same), so I do not see the relevance of this section and I think this section: Non-English titles should be deleted. -- PBS ( talk)
The recent overhaul of this page removed the (imho still valid) rationale that generic titles shouldn't be bolded. This was done in favour of going straight ahead to suggesting that it does not make sense to repeat the title verbatim to begin with.
This is very sensible imho, but it leaves those cases unresolved where the the title of a list happens to lend itself for verbatim repetition. In such cases, the page title also should not be bolded imho, for the still applicable reasoning behind the older version of this MoS page (generic titles).
Could this be amended by including clearcut advice that list titles, by simple virtue of their generic nature (i.e. the "List of X" title was generically constructed by Wikipedians), should never be bolded even in those cases where a list title happens to be repeated verbatim?
This rationale also affects other generic types of page titles, including e.g. discography pages (which are also lists). I'd just very much like never having to come across something like this again, or at least having clearcut MoS advice to point to when cleaning up such things -- because many established editors don't give a flying fuck about the MoS, and unless something is spelled out for them, they will deliberately ignore the reasonings behind items of the MoS. These editors tend to build their own rules into any rule vacuum. Of course, these same people are also the ones who shout everything down as "WP:CREEP", even though such rules are preceisely the opposite: aimed at reducing the variety and arbitrariness of rules which people make up when left to their own devices (fantasy rules such as: every single last page must have something bolded in the lead, if at all possible). -- 213.168.119.30 ( talk) 13:27, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 10 | ← | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | → | Archive 20 |
Jargon. What does it mean, and why isn't it explained in the title? Thank you. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 01:13, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
The term "lede" was deleted from this guideline, with consensus, for a reason. Why is it back in?
They are complete opposites. People not understanding this and writing Wikipedia leads as if they were journalistic ledes is a frequent, growing and decidedly non-trivial problem. By including "lede" as an alternative term for "lead" here, we are directly encouraging journalism-style abuse of the lead in Wikipedia articles. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 20:49, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
[D]ictionaries say that the term 'lede' is only used in News journalism, and the overall information appears to be that it is only applied to a particular style of introduction that is specific to News. News style ledes have a particular length, around 25 words, and you have to apply to 5 specific criteria. Our leads are nearly always longer than that and not all of those criteria are applicable for us either. In addition the style of a lede is unencyclopedic. Rememberway ( talk) 05:46, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
"Lede" and "lead" are the same word, just spelled differently to avoid confusion with the element Pb. The fact that the same word may have different meanings in different contexts is well established in English. Here is what I said about it sometime in 2011:
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:23, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
As far as I can tell "lede" was inserted into the lede of this page after this discussion in September 2010, in which there was clear consensus to include it. Looking through the history, it seems that the stable state of the page since then has been to include "lede" in the lede. So the claim that there is consensus to remove it does not seem so strong; if there ever was such consensus, the discussion in September 2010 and the stability in the 18 months since then seem to have superseded it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:04, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Also, it is not the point of a journalistic lede to hide information to convince the reader to read the rest of the article. News articles are meant to be written in an inverted pyramid style so that the reader can stop reading at any point without missing any more important information than they have already read, and so that editors can cut off paragraphs from the bottom if the story needs shortened. Compare News_style#Lead_.28or_lede.29_or_intro. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:13, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
[O]thers have contradicted this claim before: Perhaps the most salient comment from the previous version of this discussion:
[D]ictionaries say that the term 'lede' is only used in News journalism, and the overall information appears to be that it is only applied to a particular style of introduction that is specific to News. News style ledes have a particular length, around 25 words, and you have to apply to 5 specific criteria. Our leads are nearly always longer than that and not all of those criteria are applicable for us either. In addition the style of a lede is unencyclopedic.
Rememberway ( talk) 05:46, 17 May 2011 (UTC)I.e., reliable sources clearly indicate that they are different words, not alternative spellings for the same thing, and that lede is a jargon term exclusive to news journalism, which Wikipedia is not.
On Dictionaries: Oxford English Dictionary (searched online) does not include "lede" in this sense (only in 3 senses marked as "Obsolete" including "A people, nation, race. Also, persons collectively, ‘people’."). It is not included in Chambers Dictionary (1998) in any sense. We should not be using it Wikipedia. Pam D 09:16, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
It was demanded of me to demonstrate consensus against "lede". Be careful what you wish for. Here's over five non-stop hours of research, reading and commentary, compressed down into quotes and observations, presented in chronological order (and skipping the ongoing version of the debate at WT:Manual of Style/Lead section#A lead is not a lede, since it's right here and you don't have to dig in archives for it. Depending on your reading speed it should take 10 minutes or so to plow through. I wrote it as I was going, so it's a rapid-fire braindump, and probably has a bunch of typos. I'll clean it up and put it in a separate page for future reference, since I'm sure people will try to editwar "lede" back into the guideline again.
Analysis of previous "lede" debates
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Analysis of previous "lede" debates
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Conclusion: It is patently clear that only a WP:False consensus was made to add it back in, reached by less than 24 hours of discussion, involving !votes by no one but five fans of the term (everyone else had already said their piece and moved on, almost uniformly against), that did not provide a single sound rationale for the reversion of its previous long-standing removal, which was arrived at after a much longer discussion (i.e., an actual consensus, especially taking into account the general revulsion that dates to 2006, and rose to a strong tide in 2008). It's not been re-addressed until now because most people DGaF and have not noticed the correlation between the rise of "lede" being prominently used in this guideline and the increase in crappy lead sections that mirror newspaper or magazine style (or sometimes, awfully, both).
So, good luck demonstrating consensus to keep this confusing, misleading and strife-generating term in the guideline. I "rest my case", "QED", etc.
— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 20:45, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
All I can say is essentially what I have said before: I don't think it really matters whether the term is in the first sentence of the MOS Really: I don't think it really matters and I have no plans to re-insert it if it is removed, just as I was not the one who re-inserted it in 2010 [3] and I will not be the one to re-insert it when it is removed again after it is added again in a few months.
I do think that the long arguments presented in the collapsed box above provide a nice example of how English prescriptivism can work in the context of the MOS, and that these arguments are generally as full of content as the standard arguments against ending sentences with prepositions. We know how long people have maintained that particular bugbear, so it's not too surprising that those who are uncomfortable with "lede", for whatever reason, will find reasons not to like it, even while those who are comfortable with it find those reasons lacking. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:37, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
Can the standard for the lead paragraph be changed to include an anchor?
Wikipedia is the natural home for glossary information required by other websites. Rather than building their own glossaries, web authors should be able to link directly to Wikipedia. However the critical information in a Wikipedia article is in the lead sentence, and I can find no way to link directly to that paragraph the way I can link to the following sections in the article. That omission may be unimportant when an author uses an endnotes style of glossary references, but it makes using Wikipedia difficult for authors to use frames to provide footnotes that can be read simultaneously with the page using the defined term.
For example, if I am writing a page that discusses Aristotle's concept of causality, I can use the URI " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Aristotle" in a link, with a target of MyFootnoteFrame and the Wikipedia article on causality will open in that frame directly at that section. But if I use the URI " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality" the article opens at the top of the page with (today) three inches of page space before the lead sentence. For the purpose of putting footnotes in a compact frame, that effect is quite undesirable.
I tried adding '<span id="Def"/>' to the lead sentence (I now think '<span id="Topic"/>' would have been better), but that was remove (by Izno) as "unstandard".
So what is the standard practice, or what should be the standard practice, to enable authors to point directly to the lead sentence? What should be the standard URI (URL + # + anchor) to that sentence? Should a shortcut template be added so that users can obtain the URI? What instructions should be placed in this MOS article to guide Wikipedia editors in entering lead paragraph anchors? Is it possible that such anchors (and shortcuts) could be generated automatically?
Since I am in the process of building a website that requires a good glossary that I can present in a footnotes frame, I would appreciate some guidance. Should I put my efforts in upgrading Wikipedia to serve this need, or should I write my own glossary that simply links to Wikipedia? DrFree ( talk) 17:00, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia seems to crave images. I help out at the Graphic Lab and I'm often amazed by the seeming desparation to get more images onto Wikipedia, as evidenced by the sheer volume of low-quality images uploaded for want of a better image. (Where no image would be preferable, IMO.) And then there's pages like the Main Page and Portal pages that are as ugly as sin. Forgive my nostalgia but when I was a child I used to read encyclopedias for fun, and the images and diagrams were intrinsic to that experience. I'd like to see Wikipedia change drastically in terms of graphical content. Not just thumbnails everywhere but some sort of modern day illumination, with greater freedom of expression possible, making WP a more appealing read. By way of an example, what does anyboby think of this mockup of a graphical page header? (Further links are in the image description.) Any comments would be appreciated. Regards, nagualdesign ( talk) 15:46, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Your illustration is lovely, and would work somewhat well for a small number of pages on wikipedia. There are, you're right, many low quality images on wikipedia, but I'd prefer a LQI to no image: information first, aesthetics second. YMMV, of course. There are few arguments against a desire to improve the quality and layout of images on wikipedia; but there are also limitations that you need to take on board; not least that we serve multiple platforms across a range of connection types - including restricted bandwidth connections. This is why, for instance, we use thumbnails: we prioritise small size over aesthetics. You are showing no evidence in your post of any other consideration but aesthetics. So. It'd be great if we could improve the look of wikipedia, but we - you - need to understand all the use cases before you charge ahead. Here's a pair: how do these things - for instance your lovely mock-up - work for partially sighted users, or on screen readers? -- Tagishsimon (talk) 20:01, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
That mockup looks brilliant. Nagualdesign, I hope you have not goven up because of Tagishimon. The problems he and others mentions will only be encountered if poor.y implemented and can be easily avoided. I really appreciate your enthusaism and I think that graphic artists are not given due credit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.66.202.85 ( talk) 04:57, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
I was wondering if the lead section on the World Expo 88 was adequate. The article contains 26,566 characters and has a 2 paragraph lead. I added the Lead too short template last year. It hasn't been expanded since and has now been removed from the article by User:Pmsyyz, who has been removing the template from articles when the lead is clearly too short. I have asked him to stop doing that but he continues to remove the template regardless. Can I get some clarification? - Shiftchange ( talk) 06:07, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
Yugoslavia does not "refer to" such and such. It "was", rather, such and such. This is not a dictionary. I'd be interested in knowing what percent of articles in English Wikipedia start with this flawed phrase. It really should be focused on in the style manual. The phrase "refers to" suggests the article is to be about the word or term that is the title of the article. However, this is in the vast majority of Wikipedia articles not at all the case.
In Wiktionary, it would be a fairly good way to start an article, using this "refers to" expression. In Wikipedia, however, it is in most cases simply nonsense. The topic of articles here in Wikipedia are in almost all cases about a topic that the title "refers to" ... not about the article title words themselves. Which is to say, this article should not start out by focusing on the word "Yugoslavia" (which it does as it is now), but should instead focus simply on Yugoslavia. The article should not at all begin with talking about what Yuguslavia "refers to", but should instead start out by saying that Yugoslavia "was" a series of political entities and so on. I hope it won't be too many years until the administrators finally realize how silly it looks how so many articles start out with this "refers to" silliness. Please take this topic to your leaders, guys. :-) It's been a blemish on Wikipedia for years. -- 31.45.79.44 ( talk) 03:01, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
There's a discussion on Talk:2011 Tucson shooting/GA1 that descriptive titles should not be in bold. The wording that descriptive titles should not appear in boldface was introduced in 2008. It is interesting that most of the examples given in WP:SBE, a supporting essay, do show the descriptive title in bold. I suspect that the wording might be more appropriate as it was previously - "it need not be in boldface". These featured articles use bold type for descriptive titles: Yellowstone fires of 1988, Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident, July 2009 Ürümqi riots, Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It seems inappropriate for a guideline to be so strongly imposing a preference which is widely ignored. I would welcome a move back to "need not". Thoughts? SilkTork ✔Tea time 11:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
"Need not be" is certainly better than "should not be." I haven't seen a good explanation of why "should not be" makes sense, and there are many examples where "descriptive" titles work very well in bold. Another problem with this rule is the use of the word "descriptive." Hopefully all our titles are descriptive, but the rule seems to try to distinguish between titles that are "merely descriptive" (used a few paragraphs above the rule) and some other type of title. I doubt that this is useful distinction, but if it is to be used we should try to describe it better. Probably a better approach would be to write something like: "Some titles may be difficult to use verbatim in the first sentence and need not be bolded." That takes care of the 0.1% of titles where bolding seems awkward, and doesn't impose anything on the 99.9% of titles where bolding seems quite natural. Smallbones ( talk) 18:26, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
The article's title is stated as early as possible in the first sentence, and placed in bold:
The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. ( Electron)
The inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre were held in AD 80. ( Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre)
Only the first occurrence of the title, along with significant alternative titles is placed in bold:
Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. ( Mumbai)
If the article title does not lend itself to being used easily and naturally in its entirety in the opening sentence, then it does not need to appear exactly word by word, and the individual words do not need to be in bold:
The exact nature of Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) of China is unclear. ( Tibet during the Ming Dynasty)
If an article's title is a formal or widely accepted name for the subject, display it in bold as early as possible in the first sentence:
The electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. ( Electron)
Otherwise, include the title if it can be accommodated in normal English:
The inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre were held in AD 80. ( Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre)
Only the first occurrence of the title and significant alternative titles are placed in bold:
Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. ( Mumbai)
If the article's title does not lend itself to being used easily and naturally in the opening sentence, the wording should not be bent in an effort to include it:
The 2011 Mississippi River floods were a series of floods affecting the Mississippi River in April and May 2011, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
Instead, simply describe the subject in normal English, avoiding unnecessary redundancy:
The Mississippi River floods in April and May 2011 were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
If the article's exact title is absent from the first sentence, do not apply the bold style to segments that do appear:
The Beatles' rise to prominence in the United States on February 7, 1964 was a significant development in the history of the band's commercial success. ( The Beatles in the United States)
1. Bold title without link:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
2. Useful link without bold:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
My feeling is that if people have arrived on a page regarding "history of the Americas", then reassurance that they have arrived at the right page for that topic is more vital than immediately linking words in the title. In the example given, DragonHawk has recently written an elegant solution, in which the term Americas is defined in proximity to the use of the term: "The history of the Americas (North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean) begins...", which is in line with WP:EXPLAINLEAD. If the word is important to the topic, it will shortly be mentioned again, and on second use can be linked. If the word is obvious, then it doesn't need linking on first use if it contradicts with the bolding rule. If it is not obvious, then a brief summary is more useful than a link. I think we are all familiar with the "next link quest", where you are on a page, and are taken through a succession of links and pages in order to get a reasonable summary of a concept, and you end up far from where you started. While I do enjoy such serendipitous browsing, I would like an option regarding initiating such a search: give a basic summary, enough for understanding of the topic in hand, and provide a link for further detail at the earliest convenience. The link should not be vital to understanding. It should always be an option. SilkTork ✔Tea time 10:59, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
1. Bold title without link:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
2. Useful link without bold:
The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
3. Bold title with summary explanation in brackets:
The history of the Americas ( North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean) begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.
I'm sorry to chime in late here, but this is the first I've noticed these changes. I have some concerns about this section as it now stands. Substantially, the indeterminance of whether to bold that was once contingent upon whether a title was merely "descriptive" seems only to have been displaced onto whether a title can be fit acceptably into a sentence, which seems an assessment at least as disputable as whether a title is merely descriptive. I suggest that the "descriptive" concept is good, but should be refined. Notably, re the primacy of linking versus bolding, I would suggest that the relevance of linking correlates with whether titles would be bolded under this standard because articles titled like "(event) of (location)" naturally benefit from linking (event) and (location) and would generally be characterized as "descriptive" and unbolded, and thus this criterion often obviates choosing between bold or links, which seems an important benefit given the fundamental nature of the bold-vs-link editing conflict. Perhaps the test for bolding should be whether the topic has a common name, per WP:COMMONNAME? Still imperfect, certainly, but it is very much a tried and relied upon criterion and one fairly complementary to the "descriptive" standard already in use.
Also, I advise that the examples provided be illustrated as in use, consistent with wiki-linking:
The 2011 Mississippi River floods were a series of floods affecting the Mississippi River in April and May 2011, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
The Mississippi River floods in April and May 2011 were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the U.S. waterway in the past century. ( 2011 Mississippi River floods)
I suggest that this display also demonstrates that, as to the raised matter of concern about being on the desired topic, the leading links guide the eye to the topic at hand, much as bold does. The title itself at the top of the page can easily be referred to as well, if titular verification is desired, or if a topic is too broad be effectively described there then the first sentence defines the article's scope, if crafted appropriately per MOS:LEAD. This display also demonstrates that even the fitting-in-a-sentence standard still leaves many articles without bold, and to the extent that the lack of bold is a problem, this standard does so in a pattern that is actually harder to anticipate than that of the "descriptive" standard, and thus would seem only to exacerbate concern about not being on the desired topic if bold text is not encountered.
I propose changing the guidelines to advise bolding if a topic has a common name, which is similar to but more specific than advising against bolding for a merely "descriptive" title. ENeville ( talk) 21:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
There is a request for comment concerning citations in the lead of the Hydraulic fracturing article. Beagel ( talk) 10:37, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
Currently this guideline says:
Although Wikipedia's naming convention guidelines recommend the use of English, there are instances where the subject of an article is best known in English-speaking sources by its non-English name. In this case, the non-English title may be appropriate for the article.
This paragraph is wrong at many levels. First "naming convention guidelines" is wrong it should be "the Article titles policy"
"English speaking sources" I think what that means is "reliable English language sources" unless we are only using verbal sources such as radio broadcasts as sources.
If a subject is best known with a certain spelling in reliable English language sources then that spelling is not a "non-English name" but the English name of that subject.
Every article has to have a title and what that title should be is decided by the Article titles policy. This is described and made reasonably clear earlier in this guideline (eg under WP:LEADSENTENCE). By the time one comes to write the lead for the article whether the name is one used in reliable English language sources, or a name taken from reliable foreign language sources (because "there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage" WP:UE) does not alter how it should appear in the first sentence (whether or not the name in the lead comes from reliable English language sources, or reliable foreign language sources, how it is handled regarding bold etc is exactly the same), so I do not see the relevance of this section and I think this section: Non-English titles should be deleted. -- PBS ( talk)
The recent overhaul of this page removed the (imho still valid) rationale that generic titles shouldn't be bolded. This was done in favour of going straight ahead to suggesting that it does not make sense to repeat the title verbatim to begin with.
This is very sensible imho, but it leaves those cases unresolved where the the title of a list happens to lend itself for verbatim repetition. In such cases, the page title also should not be bolded imho, for the still applicable reasoning behind the older version of this MoS page (generic titles).
Could this be amended by including clearcut advice that list titles, by simple virtue of their generic nature (i.e. the "List of X" title was generically constructed by Wikipedians), should never be bolded even in those cases where a list title happens to be repeated verbatim?
This rationale also affects other generic types of page titles, including e.g. discography pages (which are also lists). I'd just very much like never having to come across something like this again, or at least having clearcut MoS advice to point to when cleaning up such things -- because many established editors don't give a flying fuck about the MoS, and unless something is spelled out for them, they will deliberately ignore the reasonings behind items of the MoS. These editors tend to build their own rules into any rule vacuum. Of course, these same people are also the ones who shout everything down as "WP:CREEP", even though such rules are preceisely the opposite: aimed at reducing the variety and arbitrariness of rules which people make up when left to their own devices (fantasy rules such as: every single last page must have something bolded in the lead, if at all possible). -- 213.168.119.30 ( talk) 13:27, 23 April 2012 (UTC)