--- Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/25/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
This part of their policy is almost funny seeing
how much we all just
"love" WP:TLAs
"No initialisms. The Policy pages of the
Citizendium may not contain
any three-letter "initialisms." For example,
"IAR," "NOR," and "AFD"
are three letter initialisms. These expressions
are a considerable
problem for new users who are unfamiliar with
them. The first time a
user introduces such an expression in a policy
page, he/she will be
warned and the expression removed. The second time
a user repeats this
offense, he will be banned for a suitable amount
of time.?
I look forward to seeing what sort of private jargon they wind up developing -- and if they realize that they've done so. Initialisms are the English Wikipedia's jargon.
Exactly.
Despite their silly "acronyms are bad, they make it hard for new people to understand what we're saying" policy, jargon is necessary and inevitable. In fact, I think in a way it's better to have acronyms like "NPOV" than to use common english words like the one Citizendium has chosen for NPOV, "neutral".
If you use a common english word, then you will have endless confusion by new or less-than-bright editors who will believe that by "neutral", everyone means the common dictionary definition of "neutral", rather than the policy definition of neutral.
Citizendium will have a policy on precisely what "neutral" means, which will change over time and take on a complex meaning as editors argue over it.
I've seen long revert wars kept going by confused editors on Wikipedia who insisted that "My source IS reliable, it's never been wrong in the last 2 years!" and "This information is verifiable, I can verify it!" and so on.
At least when you type in NPOV, people are instantly clued into the fact that a specialized term is being used, one they are not yet familiar with, and which they need to read up on before they can understand what is being discussed.
(And for God's sake, we're really supposed to fully type out "Articles for Deletion" instead of AfD, every one of the 10,000 times a day the term is used somewhere on wikipedia?)
____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html