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User:Dmcq/Summary statement

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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

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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

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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

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See also

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Notes

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