Wikipedia talk:Abbreviation expansion

message: Since 2001, there have been abbreviation expansion articles. Such abbreviation expansions are both encyclopedic (intended as destinations), and serve as a fundamental structure of the entire wikipedia to prevent Special:Lonelypages (aka orphaned pages). 
Abbreviation expansion articles often have short one or two sentence entries about each topic. Readers most often will be uncovering the meaning of a simple term in a single step, but may want to use the links there for more exploration. 
This is very different from "non-article" Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages, which are intended to catch ambiguous references and allow a team of editors to point links directly to the best article. 
Circa 2001 October 06 to 2003 May 25, various 2-letter, 3-letter, abbreviation, and acronym root lists and tables were developed. 
Since 2003 May 10, various guidelines for disambiguation of abbreviations, acronyms, and initialism has been some variant of: 
*"No need to disambiguate the abbreviations here."
*"Abbreviations pages replace disambiguation pages."
*"Such pages facilitate navigation and replace disambiguation pages."
The current guideline at Wikipedia:Disambiguation has been virtually unchanged since 2003 December 31 12:21:31, written by Docu and Eloquence working together:
Pages of common two and three letter abbreviations group series of possible expansions for the letters, such as chemical element symbols, similar to disambiguation pages.  These should be expanded beforehand.  Such pages facilitate navigation and replace disambiguation pages.  See Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations for details.
=== Conflict at Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) ===
The Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) (MoS:DP) is a comparatively recent innovation, begun on 2005 May 02 by . 
At about the same time that MoS:DP was first written, a small group (9:1) resolved Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/Deleted/April 2005#Template:TLA (without much discussion) to use  and  instead, and to use categories (later placed under :Category:Disambiguation).  This group included long-time contributors (such as Docu, Joy, Netaholic, and Radiant), who presumably understood the limited ramifications of this minor change. 
These had been in use since:
*2005-03-13 
*2005-04-24 
On 2005 June 22,  was added by Josh Parris.  On 2005 October 27, the language was substantially revised by RoySmith.  
The related  was never documented in MoS:DP.  Unfortunately, this resulted in several variants: 
* 2005-09-09 , , , and ,
* 2005-11-01  (quickly redirected to 2LCdisambig).
During this period of time, there were no corresponding changes in Wikipedia:Disambiguation and/or Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations to any actual status of abbreviations, acronyms, apocopation, or initialisms. 
=== Conflagration over radical disambiguation ===
During the latter part of 2005, a fairly limited number of young folks involved in Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation turned their efforts from finding and updating ambiguous links (which often require considerable time and effort reading each reference) to reformatting disambiguation pages themselves.  This devolved into turning anything that looked vaguely like a disambiguation page into the MoS:DP format, even when such pages (in particular, multi-stub and abbreviations pages) are explicitly stated as not disambiguation pages.
The activity caused considerable uproar (for example, most of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)/archive13, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)/Freakofnurture reverts of Tedernst: mediation needed? and the other recent archives).  One result was the removal of  articles from the ambit of disambiguation.
On 2005 November 14,  was posted for deletion (see Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/Not deleted/November 2005#Template:2LCdisambig, in an unusual step to establish consensus after orphaning had already begun.  (There was no consensus to delete it.)
On 2005 December 30, while most folks were celebrating holidays and without any prior discussion, there was a particularly damaging series of surreptitious template redirects and category closing by , who refused to abide by the prior TfD results.  Afterward, he posted on the MoS:DP talk page without mentioning his changes.
=== Straw poll on templates ===
In early January, due to the conflicts and reversion wars described above, two related straw polls (now at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)/Disambiguation subcategories covered the contested templates.
The polls were carefully limited to those elements of style related to disambiguation (a proper topic of MoS:DP), and divided the poll into: 
*(A) the questions related to abbreviation templates, and 
*(B) the questions related to the existing disambiguation lists.
The result of the polls were that the small group of disambiguators wanted all ambiguous letter combination templates removed (8:3), and all disambiguation subcategory templates removed (9:2).
Clearly, the experiment of integrating abbreviation templates with disambiguation templates, an undertaking involving dozens of editors over the past 9 months, has failed.  The comments indicate it is "confusing" and "complexity" to use several templates that automatically add subcategories.
=== Proposed migration ===
At Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)/Disambiguation subcategories#Cleanup requirements, several replacements were detailed.  There was no dissent raised on that page:
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with  
The existing (since 2004-06-13) :Category:Lists of two-letter combinations was matched with new 
*:Category:Lists of three-letter combinations, and 
*:Category:Lists of four-letter combinations.
:The two-letter category was replaced in Feb 2006 with :Category:Lists of two-character combinations. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:04, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: --William Allen Simpson 04:35, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

text: --William Allen Simpson 23:57, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Background 

message: At Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)/Disambiguation subcategories#Cleanup requirements, several replacements were detailed.  There was no dissent raised on that page:
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with  
The existing (since 2004-06-13) :Category:Lists of two-letter combinations was matched with new 
*:Category:Lists of three-letter combinations, and 
*:Category:Lists of four-letter combinations.
:The two-letter category was replaced in Feb 2006 with :Category:Lists of two-character combinations. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:04, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: --William Allen Simpson 04:35, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed migration 

message: At Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 February 20, after a short discussion, it was agreed to rename the categories (and related templates) from "letter combination" to "character combination". Coming partway through the previous migration (5LA and LND had already been completed), this results in the replacements:
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with 
*replace  with  
*replace  with 
:--William Allen Simpson 23:57, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category renaming 

message: Mr Simpson has just declared this an official policy, but I have reverted the label, since I see no evidence of consensus support for the idea.  I have linked to this page from three of the relevant talk pages.  Now that interested editors have a chance to find out about this proposal, let's take a straw poll to judge the consensus.  —Michael Z. 2006-04-02 04:40 Z
Given a 0-15 poll, I think it's safe to add  now. Melchoir 01:31, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consensus of one 

message: # One type of disambiguation page and disambiguation template is enough.  —Michael Z. 2006-04-02 04:40 Z
# There are already too many things to remember and, although I am prepared to accept that there may be a format issue to address for abbreviations, I see no reason offered by the proposer to deal with it outside the existing dab system. David91 05:12, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oppose 

message: Can anyone give a example of a expansion page concerning acronyms and abbreviations? What is the difference between disambiguation pages and expansion pages? There are no difference between disambiguation pages and pages who using the template ,  and  instead of . — 210.16.47.7 14:41, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One thing I've noticed on a lot of these "abbreviation expansion" pages are a terrific number of redlinks found on some of them (e.g. ISI). I'm guessing that these pages/links are being automatically created off some giant list of every abbreviation (or initialism?) ever conceived of -- a list that's not based on any correspondence to the articles available on Wikipedia. Is it perhaps the desire not to have those redlinks removed that is driving effort to keep those pages seperate? Ewlyahoocom 07:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The disambiguation guidelines, just like the general guidelines, permit redlinks - as long as there is a reasonable chance that the article will be written someday. So I don't think redlinks could be reason.--Commander Keane 08:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Difference between disambiguation pages and expansion pages