Is the guideline for leads in medicine-related articles in this version of the Medicine-related articles Manual of Style in agreement with Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section? Should WP:MEDLEAD be in sync with WP:LEAD?

Please avoid threaded responses in the "Survey" section, and start a new sub-section in the "Discussion" section for threaded commentary.

• No, not in sync, but should be. Remove all content from the section, WP:MEDMOS#Lead: there is nothing unique about leads in medicine-related articles, this is a fork of a standard guideline, and there is little in this section that is in agreement with Wikipedia's broader guideline, WP:LEAD. Some of the forked guideline text directly contradicts Wikipedia's broader guidelines, and application of these recommendations has resulted in choppy prose, a loss of clarity, and over-cited leads.

  See the discussion at the talk page of Featured article Schizophrenia for a sample of problems resulting from application of this guideline. The specific issues in this text—that has been disputed for many years—are:

1. Language can often be simplified by using shorter sentences, having one idea per sentence, and using common rather than technical terms. No such restriction on sentence length is in LEAD. Guidelines on making technical articles accessible are already available (MOS:JARGON and WP:TECHNICAL), and they do not include restrictions on sentence length. The advice about using common rather than technical terms is contained in the general sections of MEDMOS, and is not unique to the lead. Application of this sentence length restriction and oversimplified language has led to a loss of clarity and the precision required in medicine (see Talk:Schizophrenia example cited above).
2. It is also reasonable to have the lead introduce content in the same order as the body of the text. This is not true for every topic, and forcing the lead to a specific flow causes prose deterioration in articles (particularly Featured articles with carefully written leads) where the flow of information may need to be presented differently than the set structure that has been imposed. There is no such requirement at LEAD, and forcing a set structure can actually cause the lead to be less understandable to a broad audience.
3. Avoid cluttering the very beginning of the article with pronunciations or unusual alternative names. This is distinctly at odds with the wider guideline, MOS:LEADALT.
4. Medical statements are much more likely than the average statement to be challenged, thus making citation mandatory. This text is at odds with LEAD (see example at Talk:Schizophrenia). Text that must be cited is clearly discussed in broader guidelines: no evidence that medical content is any different has been presented. That overcited leads aid the reader has been rejected by the broader community, and medicine is not an exception.
5. The final sentence at WP:MEDLEAD indicates why these deviations from WP:LEAD have been introduced: To facilitate broad coverage of our medical content in other languages, the translation task force often translates only the lead, which then requires citations. Translation to other languages may be a laudable goal, but to facilitate a non-English-Wikipedia project, restrictions in medical articles that go beyond WP:V and LEAD are being added to MEDMOS, resulting in deterioration of leads on en.wikipedia. The chart does not contain information unique to medical content.

Medicine project guidelines must remain consistent with Wikipedia's broader guidelines. If the Wikipedia community wants to force citations and short sentences in a set order into leads for purposes of translation to other languages, that should be accomplished at WP:LEAD, not within the guidelines of one Wikiproject. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:10, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Reject RfC wording as a leading question where there is only one right answer. However, this is not the website to argue that the rules must be followed without exception. Is there any actual problem apart from pointless arguments about whether complex jargon (because it's an encyclopedia) is preferable to comprehensible wording, or whether the rule about no-citations-in-lead is mandatory? Are Pokemon articles really the same as medical articles? Johnuniq (talk) 22:40, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I added a second question to hopefully make the choice less binary. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:55, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]