Help:Summaries

Purpose

Graphically designating summaries in articles helps in several ways:

• In long articles, summaries of the article (usually above the table of contents) are a helpful way to introduce a reader to the article. Designating the first section as a summary tells the reader that they can reliably read that summary and know what the article is about.
  • Note: This is only helpful if another editor has taken the time to actually summarize an article. Perhaps some sort of date tagging system to know when a summary is out of date is in order.
• Tagging something as a summary indicated that the sources for the information are associated with the more detailed information somewhere, which prevents having to double-source facts on a page or clog the summary/introduction with footnotes.
• It is often useful to summarize the contents of an article, be it a sub-page (in the case of a larger-scale article) or simply pointing out the information in another page. If such summaries are restricted only to summarizing what is stated in the full article, then these summaries don't have to be fully sourced, which could take a lot of time.

Use

To see articles that use the {{summary}} tag, see the Template:Summary or use the "what links here" function.

How-to

To install the summary template, simply insert a "{{summary|" on the line above where the summary starts and close it with a "}}" where you want the summary box to end.