History:Style/Titles/Abbreviations

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Style for Abbreviations

Abbreviation - (from Latin brevis "short") is strictly a shortening, but more particularly, an abbreviation is a letter or group of letters, taken from a word or words, and employed to represent them for the sake of brevity

Abbreviations should generally be expanded, particularly in ExtraTitleInformation. The main exceptions are "feat." for "featuring" when describing additional artists (see FeaturingArtistStyle), and "vs." for "versus" which is a type of artist collaboration (see VersusStyle).

Acronyms such as "OST" should not be expanded.

As usual, ArtistIntent may override this guideline (see StylePrinciple).

Rationale

Abbreviations can be ambiguous, and by that I mean that one single abbreviation can mean several different words when expanded. This issue becomes very important when dealing with multi-lingual words, for example the word "Volume" and "Volumen" are both abbreviated to "Vol." and there is no way to tell which expansion is correct without doing further research. As we intend to support other languages in future, we should make entries as unambiguous as possible for easy manipulation at a later date.