Talk:Ask OLPC a Question/archive/Q1 2006
discusion
I made this to help organize the feilding questions. Any input would be apprciated.--Stranger 23:49, 13 June 2006 (EDT)
I wonder if I could ask people that if they use an abbreviation in a piece of text that the full wording be used the first time with the abbreviation in parentheses afterwards, then use the abbreviation on its own.
For example, RFP was used in an answer. I did not know what it meant so I looked it up at http://www.yahoo.com and found the meaning of Request For Proposal and a link to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFP page.
Certainly, I had a look at the RFP disambiguation list and found an interesting article about the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond%2C_Fredericksburg_and_Potomac_Railroad and that linked to an article on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_and_Ohio_Railroad and that linked to a page about Ellicott City, Maryland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellicott_City%2C_Maryland of which city I was previously unaware. So some serendipitous web surfing as a result of an abbreviation whose meaning was not then known to me, so there was an interesting outcome.
However, I ask this about abbreviations because some people are not as knowledgable about such things as are some others and some pages in this wiki are at times starting to become acronym heavy. That in itself may or may not be a bad thing if the discussion is highly technical amongst experts, yet does make the task of some of us who are trying to learn a harder task. However, in overview documents and Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ) pages it would be helpful if abbreviations were introduced as in the example in this sentence. After that first usage, the abbreviation, in this example FAQ, could be used without an explanation of its meaning, as in this sentence.
William Overington
2006-06-14 1345Z