User:Dmcq/Summary statement

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

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

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

• {{summary disputed}} where someone thinks the summary is plain wrong or misleading
• {{summary improve}} where it just doesn't summarize reasonably well