User:GreenMeansGo/Leaditis
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: The lead is not more important than the body. If you find yourself thinking that the lead is more important than the body, consult your physician. If symptoms persist for more than four hours...I dunno...go take a break and review some AfC submissions or something. |
Leaditis is an acute mental condition that afflicts a range of Wikipedia editors, especially on controversial political or social subjects. It is characterized by caring entirely more about what content is in the lead of an article, especially as it manifests in a near total disregard for what content is actually present in the body. In it's most severe form, editors may argue for days or weeks, foregoing both food and rest, including multiple Requests for Comment and the occasional thread at WP:ANI, without noticing that the content under debate isn't present at all in the body of the article, and isn't supported by any sources currently cited.
This may be a particularly virulent form of readers first, where editors become subconsciously preoccupied over influencing readers with the attention span of a medium-sized plant, as opposed to constructing a coherent article according to policy and precedent.
Leaditis may often result in the lead of an article showing one of two distinct symptoms. Either the content is entirely or mostly unsupported by citations, because everyone was so busy arguing on the talk page that no one actually bothered to check. Alternatively, relatively innocuous passages in the lead may be supported by an inordinate amount of citations,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] especially those that aren't themselves used anywhere else in the article, because screw it.
To combat the symptoms of leaditis, it's important to follow a few easy steps, and keep a few principles in mind:
- In the name of all that is holy, take 30 seconds to verify that what you're arguing about is actually in the body of the article. Four trouts. Exactly four trouts is what you get when you post a talk page comment without checking.
- If you really need to put 15 citations on a passage in the lead, it's probably a good sign that it doesn't belong there, or doesn't belong there yet, because you apparently don't have a body that can stand on its own two feet.
- Never, ever, ever write the lead of an article first. If the lead summarizes the body, and you don't have a body, then you don't very well have anything to summarize do you?
- The lead should be roughly proportional. A good heuristic to follow is "one step down" from the body. If the body has a main section, the lead gets a paragraph. If the body has a paragraph, the lead gets a sentence. If the body has a sentence, the lead may warrant a phrase. This will grow increasingly more "rough" the longer the article gets, but it should never be 1-to-1, or really even close to that according to word count.
- There is no measure of importance other than the above rule on proportionality. The body is proportional to the sources. The lead is proportional to the body. The sources decide what's important, not us. Someone will eventually become the first human to walk on Mars, and they better damned well have more than a sentence about it in their article before you go and try to put a paragraph about it in the lead. Five trouts.
At then end of the day, if the reader can't be bothered to read past the lead, then it's not our fault. We're not writing Lead-o-pedia; we're writing an encyclopedia, and hopefully they will find the time and interest to read the rest of the article one day. Until then, it will be there waiting for them, or at least it should be.