I’ve noticed there are frequently acronyms that make sense if you’ve been here a while, but for new people there are threads that possibly don’t make any sense and the acronyms might not be easily searchable. Some examples that come to mind: COTS, KV, RI, and LRI
How simple it would be to add a way for people to mouse over a common acronym and have it show the full term, or have a button that opens a word bank with common terms? I’ve no experience with the layouts or coding of websites, so hopefully it’s not something terribly difficult to implement.
Chief Delphi is based on the Discourse platform. Discourse is pretty widely used, and I am sure that there are at least a couple third party acronym plugins available, but they are likely community made and would need to be vetted and tested by the CD administrators.
I’ve seen “RR” here mean any of “Recycle Rush”, “Rapid React”, or “Round Robin” depending on context here recently. To some extent communication is hard, and I’m not sure automatically linking common acronyms would always give a helpful result. But definitely having a good glossary and acronym list easily accessible could be helpful. I suspect there may already be some good ones out there somewhere that some teams or events have put together already that might work as a good starting point.
I like this idea, I’ve seen it implemented on another website in a forum for discussing space stuff where people also tend to use a lot of acronyms. One issue I could see is identical acronyms that mean the same thing (such as KV in a thread about event staff and kV in a thread about motors) but that could just be solved with case sensitivity in some cases.
Not sure how the extensions work but if there is a big Acronym Dictionary that it pulls from it would still be useful to just have multiple definitions of RR that are each displayed when a user hovers over an acronym. Usually, context would be enough to determine which acronym is being used, Round Robin or Rapid React, for example.
Exactly the solution I was thinking of when reading that concern/issue raised. There can’t be THAT many acronyms/abbreviations that are identical in the FIRST world, right…? Even if there was a drop down of 5-6 potential “matches”, context as you point out should be plenty for the reader to figure it out from there.
There’s definitely some overlap in acronyms - first one to come to mind is VP being both “VersaPlanetary” and “VexPro”
This is a great suggestion. Would also be a good idea to extend to common shorthand/abbreviations for robot parts that aren’t necessarily acronyms (CIM, 775)
Seems like putting a band-aid on a cut that needs stitches.
TLAs can be seen as exclusionary to outsiders and unfortunately FIRST has perpetuated this from the start with its original name “United States Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”. There is no doubt in my mind that was intentional because they thought US FIRST was cool. That of course in itself as an exclusionary name and certainly designed as such. So it is doubly exclusionary. Then the race was off to make as many TLAs and they could.
Ingroup Identity. In his book The Upside of Irrationality, Duke University psychological scientist Dan Ariely mentions, almost in passing, that acronyms “confer a kind of secret insider knowledge; they give people a way to talk about an idea in shorthand. They increase the perceived importance of ideas, and at the same time they also help keep other ideas from entering the inner circle.”
The main reason that people give for using acronyms and abbreviations is that it’s quicker than saying or writing it in full. So, if someone uses an acronym or abbreviation — ask what it means. Every time. Even if you know what it means. Someone else might not know but not want to ask. Do the same for emails, slack, and any other ways you communicate.
While having a way to look is better than nothing it still is exclusionary to the first timer.
So what really needs to be done is to assume that what you are writing could be read by anyone, not just the “in group”. That means only using stand alone Three Letter Acronyms (TLA) when they are widely known. So pretty much anything past FRC, FTC and FLL should follow good writing practice of spelling it out in full before using a stand alone TLA.
It definitely also means not making up those beyond the ones that FIRST forces upon us in the game manuals. See RR now being used to refer to Round Robin and Rapid React in addition to Recycle Rush (which is the acceptable use since it is the game we are not to mention).
Jokes aside, nearly every document I deal with at work lists acronyms (and initialisms - the difference is that an acronym can be pronounced) in the bottom. Even for things that seem incredibly obvious. My favorite is when customers try to define what BAE stands for, and inevitably gets it wrong because it officially doesn’t stand for anything.
A much simpler+easier to implement approach to this that doesn’t require some kind of plugin is to compile a list of all acronyms and make it accessible/easy to find. I’ve been on a few other jargon-heavy forums; that’s all they do and it works fine, albeit it’s slightly less convenient than the proposed solution.