Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:54, 12 October 2010

This guideline is a part of the English Misplaced Pages's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts WP:ABBR WP:MOSABBR MOS:ABBR

See Misplaced Pages:Abbreviations for a directory of all the abbreviations used on Misplaced Pages.

See Misplaced Pages:List of shortcuts for abbreviated redirects to the Misplaced Pages namespace.

This Manual of Style (or style guide) is to provide guidelines for the use of abbreviations and acronyms in Misplaced Pages articles. Adherence to the following guidelines is not required; however, usage of these guidelines is recommended. Maintaining consistency will allow Misplaced Pages to be read, written, edited, navigated, and used more easily by readers and editors alike.

Always consider whether an abbreviation may be better simply written out in full, thus avoiding potential confusion for those not familiar with it – we do not have the same space constraints as paper.

Acronyms as words in article titles

Acronyms should be used in page naming if the subject is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (e.g., NASA and radar). In order to determine the prominence of the abbreviation over the full name, consider checking how the subject is referred to in popular media such as newspapers, magazines, and other publications.

Many acronyms are used for several things; naming an article with the full name helps to avoid clashes. A useful test to determine what an acronym usually refers to can be done by checking abbreviations.com, and finding the relative usage for the acronym. If it is found that an acronym is chiefly used to refer to a particular subject, the article on that subject can be expressed as the acronym. A disambiguation page can then be created for the other subjects.

Whether the acronym or the spelled-out phrase is preferable in many particular cases is debatable, but this can work itself out with the #REDIRECT ] command. For instance, DMCA and Digital Millennium Copyright Act have oscillated as to which is primary and which page redirects. Other less controversial pairs are MPAA versus Motion Picture Association of America and IMDb versus Internet Movie Database.

However, in many cases no decision is necessary because a given acronym has several expansions, none of which is the most prominent. Under such circumstances the articles should be at the spelled-out phrases and the acronym should be a disambiguation article providing descriptive links to all of them. See, for example, AJAR, which disambiguates between Australian Journal of Agricultural Research and African Journal of AIDS Research. If the acronym and the full name are both in common use, both pages should certainly be created, and one should redirect to the other (or be a disambiguation listing).

Acronyms as disambiguators

• To make link text follow the MoS, please use standard abbreviations as disambiguators, when necessary. For example, Great Northern Railway (U.S.) and Labour Party (UK). Abbreviations are preferred over "United States" and "United Kingdom", for brevity.
• To help editors, please create redirects that contain (US). For example, Great Northern Railway (US) should redirect to Great Northern Railway (U.S.).

Acronym usage in article body

The full name should always be the first reference in an article, and thereafter acronyms are acceptable, as long as the acronym is given as an explicit alternative early (usually in parentheses). If used, acronyms should be used consistently throughout the article. There is no hard rule about periods—in general, avoid them. In either case, a consistent format should be employed throughout the article.

Acronyms in category names

For the use of acronyms in names of categories, see discussion at Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (categories)/Archive 7#Abbreviations: to expand or not to expand?.

Abbreviation types not included in this guideline

• Abbreviations in names of persons, see:
  • Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (people)#Middle names - abbreviations of names
  • Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (biographies)#Post-nominal initials
• Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (ships), for example: RMS Queen Elizabeth 2; USS Monitor;...
• Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (aircraft), for example: Douglas DC-3; Nakajima B5N;...

Widely used abbreviations in Misplaced Pages

In Misplaced Pages, abbreviations for common terms are often contained in parentheses within the head paragraph. Misplaced Pages has found it both practical and efficient to use the following abbreviations, although some can often be replaced by unabbreviated equivalents ("that is" for i.e., "namely" for viz., and so on).

Note: for abbreviations used by Wikipedians in discussion on talk pages and other non-article pages, see Misplaced Pages:Glossary.

Special considerations

• Current and former postal codes and abbreviations—such as TX for Texas, Calif. for California, Yorks for Yorkshire—should not be used to stand in for the full names in normal text.
• Mt or Mt. should not be used. Mount or Mountain should be spelled out in most situations. Exceptions are made for official names and registered trademarks. (Similarly "Saint" vs "St." or "St" in placenames should depend upon their official usage).
• Editors should almost invariably give the full name of something to be abbreviated the first time it is used, unless it is part of everyday speech and writing (such as "e.g.", "2 a.m." etc.). For example, "The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is heavily involved with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). WIPO's long-standing ICANN role ..."
• Abbreviations should be written in the same fashion each time they are used within the same article; "i.e." and "i.e." or "Col." and "Col" should not be alternated. Any special cases should have a natural reason (perhaps a list of officers in a joint Anglo-American taskforce) that should be obvious to the reader; stating such a reason explicitly will help other editors to maintain it.
• If a sentence ends with a dotted abbreviation, do not double the dot to signify the end of the sentence.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style#Acronyms and abbreviations
• Misplaced Pages:Disambiguation
• Misplaced Pages:Edit summary legend

• Misplaced Pages Manual of Style (formatting)