On 02/02/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
What is troubling here is that this should be a straightforward MoS guideline. The standards of what makes a good introduction are uncontroversial, widely known, and relatively straightforward.
It's not quite so straightforward, actually the details of introductions seem to vary somewhat depending on what they are introducing, an introduction for an essay is different to the introduction for a book, is different to the introduction for an encyclopedia article. You would hope that people would look at what an encyclopedia article's introduction should look like from multiple sources, but this apparently hasn't happened at all.
What, exactly, do people object to?
There seems to be a lot of reverts on 'consensus' grounds, particularly about what the primary purpose (whatever that means really) of the introduction should be, without ever referring to any sources whatsoever.
-Phil