Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Comments on Home Improvement: Is it necessary to expand acronyms like OSB?
Parent
Home Improvement: Is it necessary to expand acronyms like OSB?
There are some acronyms related to home improvement that are very well known: OSB, MDF, PVC. Most people who know the material they refer to, know the acronym. In fact, I would guess that a lot of people know the acronym but not what it stands for.
On a board about home improvement, it would be tedious to spell out oriented strand board every time. It would be like spelling out personal identification number on a security site, or automated teller machine on a banking site. Moreover, I would expect that people who don't know the acronym would simply use a search engine, which returns the correct result for these (and it didn't, adding "home improvement" certainly would). But this is all just my opinion.
For people interested in participating in the Home Improvement proposal, what do you think is the best option and why?
- Change nothing, let people use well-known acronyms without spelling them out.
- Require people to spell out all acronyms, no exceptions. Downvote and comment on questions that don't.
- Create tags for each acronym, like
oriented-strand-board. Ensure the tag mentions both the full name, the acronym (I'm assuming typingosbcan be made to still suggestoriented-strand-board) and an appropriate reference site like the wikipedia page. - Something else (please explain in your answer).
Post
Some amount of jargon specific to the site domain is expected and necessary. However, "home improvement" is very broad and not a specialized niche. You don't go to college to get a degree in Home Improvement.
People tend to overestimate how universal an acronym is that they happen to be familiar with. Maybe it is largely universal in their geographic region. This site is international, so unless you're really sure, err on the side of assuming your abbreviations are unique.
I've done a decent amount of home building. I've added a lot of stuff to an unfinished basement, created rooms with finished sheetrock walls, including plumbing and electrical items, built an outdoor utility shed from scratch, and the like. Of your three abbreviations OSB, MDF, and PVC, I only immediately recognized PVC, assuming you mean the material used for "plastic" pipes. Now that you've defined OSB, I have definitely used it, particularly in the utility shed. I don't remember what it was called back when I bought it, but "OSB" doesn't sound familiar.
It may be that it has a different name around here (New England), or maybe it was sold as a specific tradename. For example, I've seen many people use the term "Masonite", although that's just a particular brand name of "hardboard" or "tempered hardboard". Lots of hardboard isn't Masonite, but yet that's what it's often called.
The point is, this site has a particularly wide audience, so you should define any terms that you aren't really sure are common and universal. Just because you and everyone around you knows it doesn't say much about whether most of the audience will know it.
Expanding an abbreviation in parenthesis after its first use is cheap and easy. The extra second is well worth not alienating possible members by appearing snobby and elitist.
1 comment thread
2 comment threads