Wikipedia:Superfluous bolding explained

The Wikipedia:Superfluous bolding explained page is a Wikipedia page explaining superfluous bolding; that is, how to avoid awkward, superfluous cramming of an article's title in bold into its first sentence, producing clumsy phrasing and tautological definitions such as the one you just read.

When creating an article, editors often mimic structures seen in other articles without understanding the purpose of those structures (see "monkey see, monkey do" and Cargo cult programming). By a longstanding convention formalized in the Manual of Style, an article's title is typically repeated at the opening of the article's first sentence (in bold) usually followed by is or was and a definition. However, and should be followed only where it lends natural structure to the sentence.

Appropriate bolding
In many cases, an article's subject has a given name or commonly accepted terminology. Topics like "apple", "John Henry", "World War II", and "bluejacking" all have given names. In this case, the article's title (which is also the name of the article's subject) is mentioned at the earliest natural point in the first sentence of the article. This name and any other names for the topic (synonyms) are bolded to help readers recognize what they are looking at, especially if they have visited from a synonym's disambiguation page:

"The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (usually shortened to the United Kingdom or UK) occupies part of the British Isles in north-western Europe..."

Superfluous bolding
But Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and articles are focused on topics, not terms. Since the term "Saturn" is used for many different unrelated topics, for instance, we give each a separate article. This also means that Wikipedia has articles about topics that don't necessarily have their own names. Examples include "Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers", "Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans", "1921 in Afghanistan", and "Parity of zero". In other words, the title of the article is merely a description of the article topic, not a given name.

Trying to mimic other articles, editors will often try to fit such a title in the first sentence and bold it, leading to tautology:

...or awkward phrasing:

It also gives undue weight to the chosen title, implying that it is an official term, commonly accepted name, or the only acceptable title; in actuality, it is just a description and the event or topic is given many different names in common usage:

In the case of purely descriptive titles, we should bold the article title in the introduction, and there is no need to repeat it verbatim at the beginning of the article and fit an awkwardly worded sentence around it:

The chief electrical characteristic of a dynamic loudspeaker's driver is...