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Shouldn’t these pages be named by their full names rather than with abbreviations?
“International Mathematical Union” and “International Congress of Mathematicians”.
Of course the abbreviations can be redirects.
The full names are the redirects in these two cases (and eom). The abbreviation is very common here (in fact I knew many years earlier ICM than International Congress of Mathematicians, indeed many references say Drinfeld, Quantum groups, Proc. ICM 1986 and alike. But from the point of view of Lab I find it easier to use and remember short page names (for example, I navigate through Lab by typing the page name, including for source version which has no redirect: also the pointers to the alternative names do not list in the list of pages referring to).
On the other hand, for the terms like Hausdorff space vs. Hausdorff topological space we prefer full name in the title in order to have as precise as possible division into the notions (separated space may mean separated algebraic space and separated topological space, quite different notions, though separated is intuitively related in the two),
It is generally considered bad form in all fields to use abbreviations or nicknames (e.g. “poset” meaning “partially ordered set”) as the major entry points for concepts. There is a large potential for name conflicts which then necessitate some name change to keep them distinct - say “IMU (organization)” vs. “IMU (automata)”.
Your argument seems to be that it is more convent for those in the know.
One thing Wikipedia sort of does that the nLab lacks is an indication on a page of what redirects to it. If the nLab software was updated so that the page ““International Mathematical Union” said “redirect of IMU” would that satisfy your convenience argument?
Then again if that happened the nLab would probably be need to be cleaned up for all the redirects fixing spelling, capitalization, punctuation, pluralization, etc.
I think we will be happy when Lab gets so crowded so that things like ETCS, ZFC and IMU will need disambiguation.
If the nLab software was updated so that the page ““International Mathematical Union” said “redirect of IMU” would that satisfy your convenience argument?
No, it does say that now (try International Mathematical Union and it will tell you on the top of the page that it is a redirect) and it does not address the two main concerns. Some things like SSSR, LASER and AIDS are better known by abbreviations/acronyms than the whole spelling, but in general I am not favorable of abbreviations.
I also like longer names here.
It would be than helpful if links like
http://ncatlab.org/nlab/source/IMU work. The fact is that the redirects do not work for source and alike variant, just for the main show page (of course this is just a concern when you have problems slow connection and laptop which likes to stall when reloading and so on; for me the daily pain nowdays).
Definitely such links should work! Andrew might even be able to write a hack to do this using HTTP redirects, but really Instiki should do this.
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