 | 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: Don't clutter the lead sentence with lots of junk. Keep it readable. |
The lead sentence of an article is critically important. Not only does it establish the context and importance of the subject, but in many cases (such as search results or Hovercards) it is the only part of an article that actually gets read. Over the years, Wikipedia lead sentences have become dumping grounds for any and all metadata about an article subject, to the point of becoming virtually unreadable. While some of this information is useful for establishing context, at lot of it is just cruft that actually degrades the quality of the lead. It is important to be thoughtful about what we do and do not include in lead sentences so that we strike a balance between too much information and too little. Most importantly, a lead sentence should never get to the point of including so much metadata that it becomes difficult to read.