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The lead section may contain optional elements presented in the following order: short description, disambiguation links (dablinks/hatnotes), maintenance tags, infoboxes, special character warning box, images, navigational boxes (navigational templates), introductory text, and table of contents, moving to the heading of the first section.
The lead's job is not to sum up the topic, as understood elsewhere, but to sum up the article, regardless of how incomplete the article might be. If the lead does not sum up the topic, then the article should be improved first so it does sum up the topic. Then the lead can be tweaked so it finally does sum up the topic.
Articles start with a lead section (WP:CREATELEAD) summarising the most important points of the topic.The lead section is the first part of the article; it comes above the first header, and may contain a lead image which is representative of the topic, and/or an infobox that provides a few key facts, often statistical, such as dates and measurements.
In a lead and an article of this size, I think the lead should be a summary of article content without citations or inline links to other articles - want more info, look at the table of contents and/or click on the inline link to read the section in the body with the citations and the links to other articles (yeah, when pigs fly).
The body of the article is the source. The lead should summarize the article, putting in citations seems to stop people doing that and can make the lead say things which aren't in the article. A citation in the lead indicates to me that probably someone has stuck stuff in the lead without checking the article and making it fit in properly.
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The lead, or introduction, is the most important text in any article. To get the lead right, generally: DO: Identify the subject and why it's notable early.
A lead paragraph (sometimes shortened to lead; in the United States sometimes spelled lede) is the opening paragraph of an article, book chapter, or other written work that summarizes its main ideas. [1] Styles vary widely among the different types and genres of publications, from journalistic news-style leads to a more encyclopaedic variety.