History:Style/Titles/Abbreviations

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Revision as of 15:54, 20 February 2008 by Dmppanda (talk | contribs) (It's answered Shep :) (Imported from MoinMoin))
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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.

Discussion

Should this be edited to be a list of language specific abbreviation styles per language similar to CapitalizationStandard with AbbreviationStyleEnglish, AbbreviationStyleGerman, AbbreviationStyleJapanese, etc entries placed under it? After reading the rationale for why they should be expanded it doesn't seem to take into account the degree of abbreviation usage in different cultures. Specifically with Japanese the language tends to abbreviate things heavily; often this is done to the point where most people aren't aware of the full expansion of the abbreviated word or phrase and only know the shortened form. Expanding them would feel "odd."



I would like to see some consensus on whether to expend alt. to alternate or alternative when there's no clear indication / information given by the artist what it should be. -- Shepard 14:00, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

  • IMO all/most jazz moderators prefer "alternate" and I've seen (and done myself) quite a few edits according to that -- dmppanda 18:22, 21 August 2006 (UTC)