History:Style/Titles/Abbreviations

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Status: This Page is Glorious History!

The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past. We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.


Abbreviation 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.