Inspired by this meta question, where acceptable abbreviations are discussed, and the existence of this reference on bicycles.SE, I thought: would it make sense to create a similar CW question where to put reference to common terms used/accepted around the site?
I feels it somehow overlaps with tags, but not entirely IMO (In My Opinion ^^).
This is clearly getting out of hand. As it stands, this question, which obviously fails many of the tests for a good and valid question on this Q&A network, has 157 "answers", which have been alphabetically organized into a nearly useless, ridiculously long list of links with a subjective number next to them, and this is only going to grow. There is no end to electronic and electrical acronyms.
But what is really, really bad is that this appears to be another stick to beat people with regarding "question quality"! Why are we so keen on drawing a line and determining what is "acceptable to use on this site"? How many questions actually demonstrate a problem? Is this a pandemic, and site failure will result if we don't get this under control, or is this the result of a few busybodies that are annoyed at the one or two questions per month with somewhat odd acronyms?
If someone uses an unfamiliar term, you either move on to another question where your expertise is more useful, or you ask for clarification in a comment. This system has worked very well for every other Q&A site, and it has worked wonderfully here for the last few years.
The list is endless. There's no way to contain it so that it could and would be useful. I could double the existing list in a short period of time, and it wouldn't even scratch the surface of all the acronyms I would immediately recognize in standard electronic literature.
We already have a system to manage unclear questions, and it already works by community consensus. There is no need to define yet another set of standards one must meet.
The question/list absolutely does NOT belong on the site, failing many tests in our don't ask help page:
What types of questions should I avoid asking?
First, make sure that your question is on-topic for this site.
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.
If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
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Good idea. I got the ball rolling at https://electronics.stackexchange.com/q/108522/4512.
I already flagged it to be converted to CW.
No. Stack Exchange is not Wikipedia. We already would close a question asking "what's a motor" or "what's voltage", why would we have a giant list of it?!
If the community insists on replacing that twig in an otherwise nice figgy pudding, why not go all the way?
One of the goals for the question is to have the votes be an indicator of how likely the abbreviation is commonly known. But what if a single abbreviation can have different meanings. As an example I split up PAL and PAL and also RTL and RTL. I think that is the way to go. Thoughts anyone? Maybe improve the question text?
