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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).
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My thoughts are already apparent in the question body, but I will also add this:
It is inevitable that many new users will not bother to read the details of our style preferences. It is certainly common on the Internet at large and in general parlance to use such acronyms without expanding them. People will tend to assume we are not an exception. Moreover, people generally don't want to do a lot of homework to self-onboard to a site before they've had some positive interactions with it that makes them feel like the site provides some value.
If a new user happens to ask their first question about OSB boards or PVC pipes and the like (not inconceivable), and the first reaction they get is a downvote (probable, given option #2) and complaint about the acronym rather than attempt to help them with their question, I suspect that their feeling about this will be very negative. They will become inclined to consider Codidact an unfriendly, unhelpful community and give up on trying to participate. Given that there is interest in growing CD, option 2 strikes me as unproductive.
To be clear, I am not saying that style doesn't matter or that we shouldn't have standards. However, option 2 specifically strikes me as counterproductive.
Personal opinion, not speaking for the team:
There is a tension between being accessible to all, on the one hand, and assuming a baseline of knowledge in a site's topic. On a software-development site no one would expect you to explain what object-oriented programming is if you asked a question about inheritance. If you asked a question about configuring Eclipse no one would expect you to explain what Eclipse or an IDE is. At the other extreme, if you asked a question about implementing an obscure algorithm, people might expect you to link to or otherwise explain it. On an electrical-engineering site you shouldn't have to explain what voltage is, but might need to explain what an RMS detector is or spell it out. On a home-improvement site I don't think anybody would expect you to explain what a band saw or galvanized nails are, but for a question that depends on an obscure building code, people would probably expect some details.
I participated in another community in the past that was prone to jargon, and the convention we arrived at was: if the term will be understood by anybody who would be interested in the question, then it's ok, and otherwise find a way to add some explanation or context. We sometimes had expert-level questions on obscure edge cases that required precise technical terms where, to a beginner, those terms were the least of the barriers -- if you didn't have the background knowledge in that topic to begin with, you weren't going to understand the question no matter how carefully the technical terms were explained. Meanwhile, if those explanations had been required every time, some of those questions wouldn't have been asked at all.
All of this is incredibly subjective. We don't have lists of things that are basic knowledge and things that require explanation. I didn't know what OSB was when I read a question about it, but the title of the question referred to "engineered wood" (and there was a tag), so I was able to understand the question. If there were something specific, in the question's context, about this particular type of engineered wood compared to other types, that would be something that would benefit from clarification. If OSB is the only, or main, type of engineered wood used for (in this case) siding, then I don't think it requires more detail.
But if someone asks for more information, it's worth seeing if there's a way to provide it without it being burdensome. Sometimes it's worth editing in a few more words; other times replying to the comment might be enough to help the newcomer with a term most community members will already know. It's a judgement call. In this case there was a tag, so that might be a good place to expand "OSB" once, rather than in every associated question, while describing engineered wood.
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One solution, which I know has been discussed in other contexts, is to have a community-specific glossary of terms. A really neat way to do this would be for the first time something is included in a post that is a term in the glossary that it would automatically be hot-linked, much the way that Sefaria links are created automatically in the Judaism site.
However, I think we are a long way from that happening (step 1: create a glossary structure; step 2: create a glossary; step 3: figure out how to link automatically) and there can also be problems with terms with multiple, context-dependent, meanings.
A similar approach, but with a little manual work required when writing a question or answer is to use Wikipedia. Which works for OSB and MDF though not as well for PVC, though that is because PVC has many uses beyond water pipe and electrical conduit.
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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.
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