User:Dank/Leads

All the examples on this page are invented, to represent problems we regularly see in leads at FAC. This page and its talk page (and similar pages in other people's user space) are intended as a place for article reviewers and people who like to fiddle with prose to share thoughts. I don't envision that this page will ever turn into specific prose advice that works in every situation; that's an impossibly hard goal. The goal here is to expand on some of the points reviewers bring up during article reviews. To avoid the tedium of repeating "Some reviewers make this kind of change directly to the text, and others ask the nominator to make the change", I'll assume below that the reviewers are always making the changes themselves.

Weasel words

There's some discussion of the general topic at WP:WEASEL, but I'm talking here specifically about "known for", "noted for", and other ways of saying "People say that they like this, or at least have heard of it." Different reviewers see the problem here in different ways. Some automatically get rid of "known for" as redundant, on the theory that we're always mentioning just those attributes or achievements that are the most well-known or most important; we don't need to remind people that we're talking about those things rather than the less important things. (So: "known for its hiking trails and scenic waterfalls" can become "with hiking trails and scenic waterfalls".) Simply removing "known for" doesn't always fix the problem; "Cyrano de Bergerac has a big nose" is not an improvement over "[He] is known for his big nose"; you might write "[He] makes witty and self-effacing remarks about his big nose." "best-known" can have the same failings as "known for", but not always: most readers assume that Mozart's "best-known" piano concertos are the ones that are most often performed and listened to, and as long as this information comes from high-quality sources, there's nothing wrong with writing that. Adding "by" ("noted by critics for") deals with one problem, but this either is or sounds like the passive voice, which may or may not be the best choice.

Some reviewers like "known for", in specific situations. If historians generally agree on something, but the documentary evidence they're relying on is disputed or technical or otherwise unsuitable in a Wikipedia article, reviewers may not want to directly mention the historians or the evidence in the text, and may instead prefer to say someone is "known for" something, or something else suitably vague. But if the opinions expressed could be described as speech, indirect speech, or a paraphrase, WP:INTEXT advises specifically mentioning the speaker or writer in the text itself, rather than relying on citations to let the reader know who said or wrote what.