User:Sillyfolkboy/Lead the way

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A tale of two audiences
There are two main audiences to keep in mind when writing a Wikipedia article: the reader and the skim-reader. The former, generally, is in search of a specific topic which has caught their interest. They will, by and large, read a decent portion of the main body of a text, or (at the very least) read through the section of the article which most interests them. This person is looking to expand their knowledge for work, pleasure, or perhaps just to waste a slow Saturday afternoon. The second type (the skim-reader) is generally either (a) looking for a very specific piece of information, or (b) looking for a quick potted history of a subject. They are keen to find out that El Greco was born in Crete, completed his best works in Toledo, Spain, and is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, but generally not much else. This information will sate their hunger.

We live in a skim-reader's world. I suppose that, if they clicked one of the above links, most people probably would only read parts of the beginning of the article, and/or may have a quick scan of the main text. Looking at those linked articles, it is clear to see that we come away with the least knowledge from those which have a less adequate lead.

In an information-rich society, people become conditioned to search out only the most relevant parts of a text. Very few people will read an entire newspaper or magazine. Some may not completely take in the article which they have read. It is common for scholars and researchers to remark that they don't remember the last time they actually read a book from front to back. Words are all-powerful, but all of them all together are all-consuming.

Although it is in a somewhat different medium, Wikipedia is just the same to the reader as the printed word – a mass of letters and numbers to decode. A quality lead offers the reader the most important information, in the most accessible way, in the least time-consuming form. A quality lead will not only give the reader an understandable introduction to a topic, but also perhaps demonstrate the reasons why the complete topic (and the main body of the text) in worthy of their time.

In this way, the benefits of a good lead are two-fold. Firstly, they give the reader the key information that they want. Secondly, they complement the extended article that follows. A lead is the micropaedia to the main's macropaedia.

Leading the reader off the proverbial cliff
Too often have I seen lengthy texts topped by an inadequate summary. Drawing from the core biographies, a good example is Vladimir Lenin. As of 10 May 2009 the lead suggested that Lenin could be fairly summarised in three sentences, much of which covered his name and full name, with their respective Russian transliterations. Is this really the man who Time ranks as one of only twenty people "who helped define the political and social fabric of our times"? All you can probably take from this is that he was a Russian communist leader in the 1900s; all the important facts and interesting nuances are lost. The reader carries on into the main in the hope of finding something more perceptive, but gets bored by the time they get to reading about the sixth aspect of his mixed ethnicity. The reader gets bored because they have not yet been told why the topic worth is reading about.

The article does not have to be so weighty. The same problem occurs on Tom Hanks, Hockey, The Raconteurs, Grass, World Snooker Championship, and Madagascar.

A simple solution
What all these articles have in common is a main body of text with important information that readers will want to know, but will have to sort through to find. All it takes is one person to read the article and summarise the important points in the lead – then the article will be perhaps twice as user friendly and maybe even more interesting to the reader. There may be some close duplications on shorter articles, but that is a problem with the main article – an informative lead section should not be sacrificed just because the body needs expansion.

There is a tendency to leave the lead as a couple of sentences long until an article is pretty much fully formed. The lead should be the first port of call for the writer. This way, readers will be trained to look there first, safe in the knowledge that they will be given a brief overview and receive a firm grasp of the basics of the topic. For something that is one of the easier things to do on Wikipedia, far too many articles are falling short in giving a clear, basic summary of their respective topics.
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