Imagine you don’t know who Napoleon was. You know he’s a figure from history, but you don’t even know he has to do with France. And imagine, when you read the Wikipedia article, for some reason you skip the opening paragraphs above the fold, and you’re reading about his upbringing in Corsica as a petty Italian noble under French rule. And you just want to know, why’s this guy important, what’s his deal, why do people keep talking about him (something military, it seems?) but you have to read two-thirds of the way through the article to find out, oh, he became Emperor of the French. Finally, you have context to understand everything else, and you now know the first thing about Napoleon.