[WikiEN-l] Citizendium to launch this week

[bobolozo]

--- Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/25/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at 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?)


 
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