"Widely regarded as one of the finest regional orchestras in the country" opened a community symphony's Wikipedia article through four revisions and two Articles for Creation submissions. Nine hundred words followed it. None of them mentioned a ranking, a critic, or a single outlet that had ever compared the orchestra to another.
Wikipedia's style guide treats the lead section as a compressed echo of the body, never an independent claim with its own standing. The rule is blunt about what that means in practice: significant information has no business sitting in the first paragraph if the rest of the article never comes back to prove it.
The mismatch usually starts before the article has any sourcing at all. A communications office drafts an opening line meant to impress a reader who will never scroll further, lifts it from a season brochure or a grant application, and drops it in months before anyone writes the body. When the body finally gets sourced — a founding date from the orchestra's own site, a musician count from a program note, a hall name from a local arts calendar — none of that reporting ever touches the superlative sitting above it.
A reviewer at Articles for Creation works through a draft clause by clause, and an unsupported lead is one of the fastest declines to write: the claim gets traced forward into the body, finds no footnote waiting for it, and comes back out with a note that the lead asserts more than the article proves. New Page Patrol runs the same check after publication, usually with less patience — a citation-needed tag if the rest of the article holds up, a flat deletion of the clause if it doesn't.
Significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article.
The fix runs in the opposite order from how most drafts get written. Source the body first — every fact that will survive scrutiny, cited to something independent of the subject wherever the claim is the kind that needs it. Build the lead only out of sentences the body has already earned. A real superlative, the kind a critic or a trade publication actually printed, belongs in the body with its citation attached; once it's there, the lead can repeat it in plain language without a footnote of its own, because WP:LEADCITE lets the lead borrow sourcing it doesn't have to duplicate — but only from a body that actually holds it.
The orchestra's article kept its sentence through two submissions because nobody had checked what the next nine hundred words were doing. The third reviewer did, in about four minutes, and the sentence came out. What replaced it was shorter and said less — a subscriber count, a founding year, the name of the hall — and every word of it had already been proven one paragraph down.
