Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 02:35, 28 June 2011

This guideline is a part of the English Misplaced Pages's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts MOS:ABBR WP:ABBR WP:MOSABBR

This Misplaced Pages Manual of Style is to provide guidelines for the use of abbreviations, including acronyms, contractions, initialisms and shortenings, in the English Misplaced Pages and Simple English Misplaced Pages. Adherence to the following guidelines is recommended because maintaining consistency will allow Misplaced Pages to be read, written, edited, navigated and used more easily by readers and editors alike. The style should always be consistent within a page. If a guideline conflicts with the proper usage of a proper name, ignore it. Quotes should always be written exactly as the original source, unless the quote is a translation.

Always consider whether an abbreviation may be better simply written out in full, thus avoiding potential confusion for those not familiar with it. Remember that Misplaced Pages does not have the same space constraints as paper.

Full stops in abbreviations

Modern usage is to use a full stop after a shortening, but no full stops with an acronym, contraction or initialism. In American English, full stops may also be used with initialisms and single-word contractions, but acronyms should never contain full stops. Initialisms containing full stops between letters should also have a full stop after the final letter. If an initialism is the last word in a sentence, do not put two full stops (e.g. New York is in the U.S. not New York is in the U.S..).

Acronyms and initialisms

Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letters of words in a phrase; the difference being acronyms are pronounced as the word is spelled (e.g. NATO), whereas in initialisms, each letter is pronounced individually (e.g. ABC). Some acronyms are written with all capital letters, some with a mixture of capitals and lower case letters and some are written as common nouns. All initialisms are written in capitals. The letters of acronyms and initialisms are never spaced. Plural acronyms and initialisms are written with a lowercase "s" afterwards, without an apostrophe unless full stops are used between letters. Unless it is on one of the two tables below, an acronym or initialism should be written out in full the first time it is used on a page, with the abbreviation in brackets afterwards (e.g. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)). Common exceptions to this rule are acronyms and initialisms of titles in names because writing them out in full would cause clutter. In tables, infoboxes and navboxes, acronyms and initialisms do not need to be written out in full. When not written in full on first use, an acronym or initialism should be linked. An unambiguous acronym can be linked as is, but initialisms and ambiguous acronyms should be linked to their respective full name.

Acronyms that can be used without spelling out in full first

Acronyms on this table do not need to written out in full the first time they are used on a page, except in their own articles or if not doing so would cause ambiguity.

Initialisms that can be used without spelling out in full first

Initialisms on this table do not need to be written out in full the first time they are used on a page, except in their own articles or if doing so would cause ambiguity.

Acronyms and initialisms in page titles

Acronyms should be used in page naming if the subject is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (e.g. NASA and radar). In order to determine the prominence of the abbreviation over the full name, consider checking how the subject is referred to in popular media such as newspapers, magazines, and other publications.

Many acronyms are used for several things; naming a page with the full name helps to avoid clashes. A useful test to determine what an acronym usually refers to can be done by checking abbreviations.com, and finding the relative usage for the acronym. If it is found that an acronym is chiefly used to refer to a particular subject, the article on that subject can be expressed as the acronym. A disambiguation page can then be created for the other subjects.

Whether the acronym or the spelled-out phrase is preferable in many particular cases is debatable, but this can work itself out with the #REDIRECT ] command. For instance, DMCA and Digital Millennium Copyright Act have oscillated as to which is primary and which page redirects. Other less controversial pairs are MPAA versus Motion Picture Association of America and IMDb versus Internet Movie Database.

However, in many cases no decision is necessary because a given acronym has several expansions, none of which is the most prominent. Under such circumstances, the articles should be at the spelled-out phrases and the acronym should be a disambiguation page providing descriptive links to all of them. See, for example, AJAR, which disambiguates between Australian Journal of Agricultural Research and African Journal of AIDS Research. If the acronym and the full name are both in common use, both pages should certainly be created, and one should redirect to the other (or be a disambiguation listing).

Acronyms and initialisms as disambiguators

• To make link text follow the MoS, please use standard abbreviations as disambiguators, when necessary. For example, Great Northern Railway (U.S.) and Labour Party (UK). Abbreviations are preferred over "United States" and "United Kingdom", for brevity.
• To help navigation, please create redirects that contain (US) and (U.S.). For example, Great Northern Railway (US) should redirect to Great Northern Railway (U.S.).

Acronyms and initialisms in category names

For the use of acronyms in names of categories, see discussion at Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (categories)/Archive 7#Abbreviations: to expand or not to expand?.

Contractions

Contractions are abbreviations of one or more words that have some or all of the middle letters removed but keep the first and final letters (e.g. Mr and aren't). Missing letters are replaced by an apostrophe in multiple-word contractions. Multiple-word contractions should not be used in Misplaced Pages but single-word contractions are fine as long as they are not ambiguous. Uncommon contractions should be linked on first use on a page.

Abbreviations not included in this guideline

• Abbreviations in names of persons, see:
  • Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (people)#Middle names - abbreviations of names
  • Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (biographies)#Post-nominal initials
• Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (ships), for example: RMS Queen Elizabeth 2; USS Monitor;...
• Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (aircraft), for example: Douglas DC-3; Nakajima B5N;...

Widely used abbreviations in Misplaced Pages

In Misplaced Pages, abbreviations for common terms are often contained in parentheses within the head paragraph. Misplaced Pages has found it both practical and efficient to use the following abbreviations, although some can often be replaced by unabbreviated equivalents ("that is" for i.e., "namely" for viz., and so on).

Special considerations

• Current and former postal codes and abbreviations—such as TX for Texas, Calif. for California, Yorks for Yorkshire—should not be used to stand in for the full names in normal text.
• Mt or Mt. should not be used. Mount or Mountain should be spelled out in most situations. Exceptions are made for official names and registered trademarks.
• "Saint" vs "St" or "St." in placenames should depend upon the official usage.
• Editors should almost invariably give the full name of something to be abbreviated the first time it is used, unless it is part of everyday speech and writing (such as "e.g.", "2 a.m." etc.). For example, "The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is heavily involved with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). WIPO's long-standing ICANN role ..."
• Abbreviations should be written in the same fashion each time they are used within the same page (e.g. "US" and "U.S." should not be alternated). Any special cases should have a natural reason (perhaps a list of officers in a joint Anglo-American taskforce) that should be obvious to the reader; stating such a reason in a hidden note will help other editors to maintain it.
• If a sentence ends with a dotted abbreviation, do not double the dot to signify the end of the sentence.

See also

• American and British English differences#Punctuation
• Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style#Acronyms and abbreviations
• Misplaced Pages:Disambiguation
• Misplaced Pages:Edit summary legend

Notes

1. N/A is an exception to the normal format of initialisms. It should always be written N/A and never NA, N.A., na or n.a.. The capitalized form is preferred over n/a.
2. USA, U.S.A. and U. S. of A. should not be used.

• Misplaced Pages Manual of Style (formatting)