Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox post, Write for Reuse, argues for changing how we write to accommodate the well-researched fact that users will discover and approach a given page in a myriad of ways. The critical importance of how we word titles and headings is part of it, but I was caught by his argument to craft the opening text carefully, as users read only this in many cases, to judge whether this is the right page to answer their question/problem. I realized that I do this myself (read the intro quickly to evaluate the merit of staying on the page).

So, even though minimalist studies suggest that users skip over intros to get to the meat (procedure steps), that seems to me the case largely when users are confident that the procedure they've located is the one they definitely want, and that's only a fraction of cases. I think topic intros are important for times when users have doubt as to whether they need or ought to be doing the task, whether the odds of getting an answer here are good enough to keep reading. Brief intros that offer just enough context, summarization, and conceptual framework to let users judge whether to stay or leave seem to me to be increasingly important for supporting users who discover content largely by search.