User talk:Rkinch/Archive 2

GW170817 reversion of lead changes
WP:Lead says "The notability of the article's subject is usually established in the first few sentences" and "For topics notable for only one reason, this reason should usually be given in the first sentence" but "Try to not overload the first sentence by describing everything notable about the subject". I think I did this in GW170817. As near as I can figure, you think that notability in the lead should not apply to this article. Why not? --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 05:11, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Notability, of course, applies. But the GW170817 story encompasses many notable items, each difficult to describe precisely, unambiguously, crediting significance, and logistically.  The lead paragraph has enough to do to establish what this gibberish term "GW170817" is fussing over, and any lengthy qualifying clauses about this or that notable quality make it impenetrable to anyone trying to get the basic idea of who/what/when/where.  The first paragraph should stick to those journalistic basics, and then the various notable qualities can be introduced in later paragraphs.  Otherwise a cold reader will give up instantly.  The article intro is still full of nasty ambiguities: "is" instead of "was", whether GW170817 is the instrument digital dataset, the analog signal, the gravity wave, the optical phenomena, the astrophysical event, then, now, in the future, what?  The trouble is due to this story being a big deal in astrophysics, bigger than the GW170817 signal dataset, but the whole big story has to be told apparently in this article.  This article is not very old, and grew from a lot of excited experts fleshing out and resolving rumors and trying to cram in all kinds of technical facts and details, which led to it being the expert technical reference point of view and not an encyclopedic tone.  It's going to be a big editing job to comb the prose into something readable and genteel for the Wikipedia target audience.  So I agree that your editing point was an item of notability, but overworking the subject for the lead paragraph.  I suggest your valid point belongs in later intro paragraphs (which themselves need work for being clogged up and overwrought with a lot of hairy, ambiguous, impenetrable expertise). And let's take this up on Talk:GW170817 if you want to discuss further. Richard J Kinch (talk) 08:10, 23 October 2017 (UTC)