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I noticed something in MOS:LEADLANG that could do with some clarification.
While point one to four complement each other, point 5 seems to be open to interpretation: why mention "separate languages" if we're only supposed to include "a single foreign language" in the lead sentence? When dealing with multiple languages, do we keep the single foreign language equivalent that is closely associated with the subject and move the others to a footnote or do we move all of them to a footnote? Thanks. M.Bitton ( talk) 16:25, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
References
pinging those who edited the article recently.@ Schierbecker, HansVonStuttgart, SMcCandlish, Anachronist, Thinker78, Moxy, Loytra, and MicrobiologyMarcus: your thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated. Best, M.Bitton ( talk) 16:37, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
I propose we change this:
to this:
The logic is clear — if the "pronunciations are well known", then no pronunciation guide is needed. I don't see any good reason to limit this sound guidance to countries.
CUA 27 ( talk) 00:03, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
I propose adding the green text:
With these changes, the following unreadable first sentence:
becomes much more readable, with no information lost:
CUA 27 ( talk) 00:36, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
Hey, does MOS:LEADCITE apply to notes which are linked to the lead only, example Horizon Forbidden West. Thanks, Indagate ( talk) 08:03, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Nixxes Software then ported the Complete Edition to Windows on 21 March 2024. [1]That claim may need to be qualified, but that does not mean that a citation is needed in the infobox.
References
Donald Albury 20:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I've frequently seen people respond to challenges over material in the lead of an article solely by pointing to LEADCITE, without indicating what citations in the body they feel support the statements in question. I don't think this is acceptable;
WP:V is non-negotiable and is vastly more important than keeping an uncluttered lead, which means that every statement in an article, including the lead, must have citations somewhere in the article, and per
WP:BURDEN, someone who wishes to retain them must actually be able to produce the citations in question - vaguely waving a hand at the entire article and implying that they exist is insufficient (and makes verification incredibly difficult.) When text is challenged you must actually be able to produce the specific citations that support it. I suggest adding a bit to LEADCITE along the lines of Citations for challenged material can be omitted from the lead of an article only when the relevant citations exist in the body; therefore, when responding to a challenge over text in the lead of an article,
WP:BURDEN requires that you clearly indicate, in your edit summary or on talk, which specific citations already in the article support the text in question. Because
WP:V is core policy, an article-specific consensus to omit citations from the lead of an article cannot overcome this requirement.
--
Aquillion (
talk)
22:56, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
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)
(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)
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)
Thoughts on adding the proposed sentence (shown below in bold so editors can readily see the change):
Some examples where non-Roman script provides clutter to all readers, but probably helps only a very tiny minority of readers:
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)
Checking to see if anyone wants to weigh in? CUA 27 ( talk) 12:46, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
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This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Manual of Style/Lead section page. |
|
Archives:
Index,
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23Auto-archiving period: 120 days
![]() |
![]() |
Manual of Style ![]() ![]() | |||||||||
|
I noticed something in MOS:LEADLANG that could do with some clarification.
While point one to four complement each other, point 5 seems to be open to interpretation: why mention "separate languages" if we're only supposed to include "a single foreign language" in the lead sentence? When dealing with multiple languages, do we keep the single foreign language equivalent that is closely associated with the subject and move the others to a footnote or do we move all of them to a footnote? Thanks. M.Bitton ( talk) 16:25, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
References
pinging those who edited the article recently.@ Schierbecker, HansVonStuttgart, SMcCandlish, Anachronist, Thinker78, Moxy, Loytra, and MicrobiologyMarcus: your thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated. Best, M.Bitton ( talk) 16:37, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
I propose we change this:
to this:
The logic is clear — if the "pronunciations are well known", then no pronunciation guide is needed. I don't see any good reason to limit this sound guidance to countries.
CUA 27 ( talk) 00:03, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
I propose adding the green text:
With these changes, the following unreadable first sentence:
becomes much more readable, with no information lost:
CUA 27 ( talk) 00:36, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
Hey, does MOS:LEADCITE apply to notes which are linked to the lead only, example Horizon Forbidden West. Thanks, Indagate ( talk) 08:03, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Nixxes Software then ported the Complete Edition to Windows on 21 March 2024. [1]That claim may need to be qualified, but that does not mean that a citation is needed in the infobox.
References
Donald Albury 20:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I've frequently seen people respond to challenges over material in the lead of an article solely by pointing to LEADCITE, without indicating what citations in the body they feel support the statements in question. I don't think this is acceptable;
WP:V is non-negotiable and is vastly more important than keeping an uncluttered lead, which means that every statement in an article, including the lead, must have citations somewhere in the article, and per
WP:BURDEN, someone who wishes to retain them must actually be able to produce the citations in question - vaguely waving a hand at the entire article and implying that they exist is insufficient (and makes verification incredibly difficult.) When text is challenged you must actually be able to produce the specific citations that support it. I suggest adding a bit to LEADCITE along the lines of Citations for challenged material can be omitted from the lead of an article only when the relevant citations exist in the body; therefore, when responding to a challenge over text in the lead of an article,
WP:BURDEN requires that you clearly indicate, in your edit summary or on talk, which specific citations already in the article support the text in question. Because
WP:V is core policy, an article-specific consensus to omit citations from the lead of an article cannot overcome this requirement.
--
Aquillion (
talk)
22:56, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
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)
(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)
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)
Thoughts on adding the proposed sentence (shown below in bold so editors can readily see the change):
Some examples where non-Roman script provides clutter to all readers, but probably helps only a very tiny minority of readers:
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)
Checking to see if anyone wants to weigh in? CUA 27 ( talk) 12:46, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
Cite error: There are <ref group=note>
tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=note}}
template (see the
help page).
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha>
tags or {{efn}}
templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}}
template or {{notelist}}
template (see the
help page).
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).