Wikipedia:Superfluous bolding explained
 | This is an explanatory essay about the guideline Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section § Format of the first sentence. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Don't twist an article's opening sentence into a pretzel in the mistaken belief it must robotically repeat the article's title somehow. |
Wikipedia:Superfluous bolding explained refers to a Wikipedia page explaining superfluous bolding; that is, how to avoid awkward, superfluous cramming of an article's title in bold into its first sentence, producing clumsy phrasing and tautological definitions such as the one you just read.
When creating an article, editors often mimic structures seen in other articles without understanding the purpose of those structures (see "monkey see, monkey do" and Cargo cult programming). By a longstanding convention formalized in the Manual of Style, an article's title is typically repeated at the opening of the article's first sentence (in bold) usually followed by is or was and a definition. However, this practice is not mandatory and should be followed only where it lends natural structure to the sentence.
Appropriate bolding
[edit]In many cases, an article's subject has a given name or commonly accepted terminology. Topics like "apple", "John Henry", "World War II", and "bluejacking" all have given names. In this case, the article's title (which is also the name of the article's subject) is mentioned at the earliest natural point in the first sentence of the article. This name and any other names for the topic (synonyms) are bolded to help readers recognize what they are looking at, especially if they have visited from a synonym's disambiguation page:
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (usually shortened to the United Kingdom or UK) occupies part of the British Isles in north-western Europe...
Superfluous bolding
[edit]But Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and articles are focused on topics, not terms. Since the term "Saturn" is used for many different unrelated topics, for instance, we give each a separate article. This also means that Wikipedia has articles about topics that don't necessarily have their own names. Examples include "Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers", "Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans", "1921 in Afghanistan", and "Parity of zero". In other words, the title of the article is merely a description of the article topic, not a given name.
Trying to mimic other articles, editors will often try to fit such a title in the first sentence and bold it, leading to tautology:
The electrical characteristics of a dynamic loudspeaker are a dynamic loudspeaker driver's electrical characteristics, the chief one of which is...
...or awkward phrasing:
It also gives undue weight to the chosen title, implying that it is an official term, commonly accepted name, or the only acceptable title; in actuality, it is just a description and the event or topic is given many different names in common usage:
In the case of purely descriptive titles, we should not bold the article title in the introduction, and there is no need to repeat it verbatim at the beginning of the article and fit an awkwardly worded sentence around it:
The chief electrical characteristic of a dynamic loudspeaker's driver is...
