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Partially capped abbreviations with multiple letters from a word
Do
MOS:TM or
MOS:ABBR or other MoS sections have any examples like "YAStrA" as an abbreviation for "yet another strange abbreviation"? Would the MOS prefer something like "YASTRA" or "Yastra" for that, if we assume sources are mixed? —
BarrelProof (
talk)
18:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The first example article I thought of,
ExCeL London (from Exhibition Centre London) consistently uses the mixed capitalisation, looking at a random selection of independent sources cited in the article there is an approximate 50/50 split between "ExCeL" and "Excel", there were no instances of "EXCEL". The article is tagged as needing cleanup for (among other things) being written like an advert though so it's best not to treat that as definitive.
The only featured article I spotted of potential relevance is
AdS/CFT correspondence but that's from
anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (so not quite the same) and it seems clear that that is the universally agreed correct capitalisation, so also of limited use to this question.
The
Camel case article led me to
National Novel Writing Month, which consistently uses capitalises the abbreviation as "NaNoWriMo", but so do pretty much all the sources (one of the hits on the first six pages of a google search for "nanowrimo" used it in all lowercase, everything else used the mixed case).
One that came to my mind is
IMDb, but as far as I know, sources use that form (and that site itself dominates the search results rather than independent sources). I want to know what should happen if the sources are mixed. The topic that caused me to ask the question is
ULTra (rapid transit), but I prefer to ask the more general question rather than focus on that one topic. After further digging, that one has its own specific evolution (see
Talk:ULTra (rapid transit)). —
BarrelProof (
talk)
23:02, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I had an idea and put a list of some possibly relevant titles in
my sandbox (all those in the 23 November article titles dumb that start with the letter case pattern AAaAa and contain no spaces). I've started to look through the list, most are redirects that are completely irrelevant that I'm just deleting to keep the list manageable (e.g.
ASoIaF →
A Song of Ice and Fire) and I've made notes on the others. So far I've not found any where the sources are inconsistent, but please feel free to use and edit that page.
Thryduulf (
talk)
01:40, 20 March 2024 (UTC)reply
@
BarrelProof I've looked at some more from that list and found exactly one article that is directly relevant -
FLiBe. The article consistently uses that capitalisation, but sources are mixed with "Flibe" being more common among the first few sources. I didn't find any examples of "FLIBE" or "flibe". The article is rated start class and has a cleanup tag for bare URLs so it seems unlikely this should be regarded as definitely conforming to the manual of style.
Thryduulf (
talk)
15:34, 20 March 2024 (UTC)reply
My gut feeling is that where there is a clear predominance in independent reliable sources for one form we should use that, where usage is more mixed than that we should probably prefer whatever the official styling is. Where there isn't an official styling or it's unclear what it is, then treat it like we do Engvar issues - i.e. any form consistently found in reliable sources is fine, but be consistent within an article and don't change without good reason. Where usage is mixed in reliable sources or where our article differs from the official stylisation we should default to noting the multiple forms in the lead. Obviously we should not be using a form not found in reliable sources (e.g. EXCEL, FLIBE).
Thryduulf (
talk)
18:40, 20 March 2024 (UTC)reply