User:Dmcq/Summary statement

All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable published source. A statements in an article may summarize parts of the article itself, in this case the statement is attributable to a section of the article itself. Summary statements may not be attributable to another article.

Summary statements are typically used in the lead of an article or in the introduction to a section with subsections.

Key principles
The problems with copying the citations from the section being summarized to the summary statement are:


 * It divorces the lead from the article in as much as instead of describing a part of the article it is describing what is in a source instead.


 * Citations get duplicated meaning people must learn about named citations or have a mess at the end.


 * The leader tends to have a long list of citations after individual statements since they summarize a number of sources.


 * It makes the leader stilted and less approachable instead of being an easy introduction into the article.

These problems are made worse by the way readers are likely to put a citation needed into the lead of an article since the lead is the first place they see the problem.

Summary style citations
A summary citation refers to what's summarized.

For example 'Monsoons in Mojimbe regularly kill thousands of people.[Monsoons] ' refers to the section 'Monsoons' instead of listing the various citations from that section.

Problems in summary statements

 * summary disputed where someone thinks the summary is plain wrong or misleading
 * summary improve where it just doesn't summarize reasonably well