Help talk:Writing article introductions

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Programming Languages - Introductory Paragraph

I was looking at the Python article, and noticed it has a quite verbose description of what Python is, copied from Wikipedia. I would prefer shorter description, which still captures the essentials. In the concrete example, i would pick the first paragraph from python tutorial. Looking at other articles for Programming Languages, i have noticed an inconsistency. D_(programming_language) uses the same style (quoting Wikipedia) and Java also quotes Wikipedia but using a different format. Go, Haskell, PHP just have a short intro which links to the Language Homepage.This was also the case on the Python article, it was changed there on 2014-07-23. Would it be a good idea to agree on a common style? Or am i just making a fuss about an unimportant issue? Bwid (talk) 13:56, 3 September 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Personally I prefer short introductions that are either an original work, or are a reworded version of an external introduction, or even excerpts of an external intro (like your python tutorial example) that are so short they don't even require the "From website ...:" annotation (but just link the official source from a keyword in the intro itself).
This is surely not an urgent issue, but you're right it would look better if the articles' intros had a style consistent with each other. You've also found the article where such recommendation would best fit, but let's see what other users think, because I've seen some regular contributors prefer the full quotation method, and they may have their own reasons.
-- Kynikos (talk) 13:34, 4 September 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]