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submitted 7 months ago by gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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[-] Liz@midwest.social 74 points 7 months ago

Almost certainly because the most common opening sentence for an article follows the "[subject] is a member of [broader group]" structure and the more generalized you get, the more you get into entire areas of study, which are eventually classified as a kind of philosophy, which is just fancy-speak for "high-skill thinking."

[-] itsralC@lemm.ee 6 points 7 months ago

There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain". According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that articles begin by defining the topic of the article. A consequence of this style is that the first sentence of an article is almost always a definitional statement, a direct answer to the question "what is [the subject]?"