[WikiEN-l] My most reused piece of free content

[Steve Bennett]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yeah, it is a great idea.... that's why we have article introductions,
>> right?
>>
>> - causa sui
>>
>
> Yep! Our style of having an introductory paragraph that is a summary of the
> salient points of the whole article (rather than a "hook" to get people to
> read the whole thing) is a great editorial choice in my opinion. It also
> makes our content, with the API, extremely re-usable.

Yes...to a point. Our opening sentences very strictly define the
topic, frequently with birth/death dates, names in other languages,
and claim to notability. I'm thinking of a sentence that serves
strictly to delineate this topic, and contrast with other articles.

Compare:
Kim Jong-il (also written as Kim Jong Il, Korean: 김정일; born 16
February 1941; official biographies state 16 February 1942[1]) is the
Supreme Leader[2] of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (also
known as North Korea).

With:
About Kim Jong-il, current leader of North Korea, his personal and public life.

I don't know, I haven't really thought this out.


> For example, the
> National Library of Australia sucks in our introductory paragraph of
> articles about Australian newspapers for use in their newspaper digitsation
> project - for example, look in the top-right hand corner of their landing
> page for "The Argus": http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/title/13 (they
> also do a similar thing with our articles about individual authors in their
> book catalogue search.

Yeah, I love that site. :)

http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/profile/user:public:stevage

Do you have any professional connection with the site? I was nearly
going to be doing some work with them, but it fell through.

Steve