Talk:Abbreviations

Move to Glossary?

Gordon Ecker proposed moving the page to Glossary.

Terms is a content page, Glossary is a category page -- in my experience, trying to mix the two types results in a mess that loses the benefits of both types.

The upside of category pages is that they're automatic and provide quick access to links in a standard way. The downside is that they're not intelligently sorted, and are not good at providing short bits of info (as is done on this page). If you try to mix the two, then you end up with: 1) redundancy -- terms are listed both at the top in the hand-organized structure, and at the bottom in the automatic structure; and 2) poor access to the auto-generated list (which ends up being pushed so far down by content, that it's inconvenient to access.) (Qualification: Short intros (1-2 paragraphs) on category page work okay so long as they don't attempt to replicate the auto-generated list below.)

My experience: I've worked on UESP wiki for a number of years, which avoided mixing category and content. That works fine (e.g. a similar page to this one is Acronyms). In contrast, CS Wiki initially went with the "content on category pages" approach, but later backed off that as problems became apparent.

Again, the point of this page is to provide a list of common terms (esp. acronyms) with a brief description of the term on the page. Hence new users (such as myself) can have one page loaded in their browser which can be quickly read and/or scanned over to get the meanings of terms. IMO/experience this is a lot more useful and easier to use, then going to a glossary page and having to click through each link to get the meaning.

--Wrye 20:36, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

He didn't suggest moving it to Category:Glossary, he suggested moving it to Glossary. The latter is currently a redirect to the former, I assume he meant to put this content under the name and remove the redirect. --Star Weaver 21:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Ahh. Hmm... Category:Glossary is heavily used, and Glossary is already linked to somewhat. I suspect that most folks searching for Category glossary will type "Glossary" into the search bar (or /wiki), so I think it would not be good for this page (which is much more narrowly focussed thatn Category:Glossary) to replace Glossary. I'll rethink purpose of the page a little bit (seems closer to Abbreviations category, but not quite). --Wrye 21:31, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

(After looking around a bit...) How about moving it to Chat Abbreviations? Focus of page would be abbreviations that are commonly encountered in chat. That would make the focus of the page clearer and help keep it from growing to include every term from the game (which would be too large, IMO).--Wrye 21:48, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

In its' current form, chat abbreviations would be an appropriate name, however I would prefer to expand the page to cover all common terms to allow readers to skim over all the common terms on a single page. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 04:33, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

That would be useful, but I'm afraid that including all common terms would make the page so large that it would be be a bit of chore to read through. I'd prefer to have one page just for abbreviations. However, if there's a separate page with short defs for common terms, that would be useful too. (Though to me as newb, getting abbreviations explained on one page is the more useful thing.)

Hmmm... I suppose that ideal situation would be a database that can be filtered down to display a limited set of entries according to parameters fed to a template (like the various skills lists are done). I don't know how much work that would be though. (Probably simpler to NOT do that at first, but rather evolve to it if the size of list warrants it.)

One possibility is to have this page be moved to simply Abbreviations (not currently used, although Category:Abbreviations is in use), and to have a separate page be Glossary as you describe -- but "Glossary" is still subject to my concerns about existing links/search for Category:Glossary. (Maybe "Common Glossary" and "Common Abbreviations"?)

One of the problems is defining/maintaining "common" -- wiki entries to grow to expand everything that might fit. --Wrye 06:00, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Since I haven't heard back from Gordon in a few days, I've gone ahead and moved the page to Abbreviations and removed the move tag. --Wrye 23:38, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

FTW

According to urban dictionary FTW means "for the win" online. "Fuck the world" is primarily used by biker gangs. I've pulled the fuck the world version based on that, but if someone with more experience knows that both senses are commonly used in GW chat, please correct me. --Wrye 04:09, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

FTW is mostly used as for the win, fuck the world is only used by emo players78.20.153.111 22:34, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Organization

Keep in mind that people using the page don't know what acronyms stand for so, they won't know to look under "A" for "sin", so it's not redundant to have it in both places. Related to that, I've merged profession acronyms into main acronyns.

An argument could be made to merge general chat into other terms as well. I think that: 1) people will usually know the difference, and 2) it's useful for people who are familiar with general online chat to not have to wade through the general terms when reading the GW specific terms. But I'll admit that the pro/con arguments for the split are about 50/50. --Wrye 04:14, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

40/40 and such

what about them? 40/40 or 40/20 or +10 "damage type" shield, etc... 78.20.153.111 22:38, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

I do think an "item mods" section would be useful. Manifold 21:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

A few improvements

Over 7000 hours in Guild Wars, and I've never seen "wrud", anyone disagree with removing it? I don't specifically recall ever seeing Balthazar Faction being called "fac", usually shortened to "balth" or "faction".

I'd argue that "perma" is short for "permanent shadow form" and not "perma shadow form", but we don't even have a redirect for the former.

There are several other abbreviations that I see quite a bit that I think could be added, like "VS" for Voltaic Spear, "SoS" for Signet of Spirits, "SF" for Shadow Form, "essence", "backup", and "BU" for Essence of Celerity, "cons" for consumables, usually referring to a particular trio, "imbagon" for imbalanced paragon, "PvX" for PvP and PvE, "crit" for critical hit, "Rx" with x being a number for referring to title ranks, "lp" or "pick" for lockpick. That's just off the top of my head, any comments on these changes? Manifold 21:47, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

category: abbreviations

As Misery said, the list of abbreviations is anything but helpful. Only a handful of them are really used, and even then there are a lot of untruths in them (like HB never means Healing Burst). I wonder if it really pays off to put every possible abbreviation in the categories list. And also, if removing abbreviation tags from pages breaks something. Koda Kumi 17:49, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree. Abbreviations for only the ones commonly used in game should be listed. If I say HB monk, I'll always think healer's boon monk rather than healing breeze or burst. For new players trying to figure out what people are talking about it doesn't help at all to have 4-10 skills in the abbreviation pages. instead of "But may also refer to:" for other skills, I think it should say something like "Generally does not refer to:". to make it clear that when people say abbreviations, that "these" skills aren't what they are talking about. --Lania 18:59, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I'll agree with the latter phraseology (thanks firefox for telling me that there's an 'e' in there), though I'm sure there will always be people complaining about a skill getting an apparently lower billing than before. G R E E N E R 19:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Shard

Does anyone ever mean Jadeite Shards when they talk about shards? Koda Kumi 15:06, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

yes, but mostly (99% of the time) people say jade Rhonin Soren 23:22, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

They're talking about obsidian shards

Temple of Ages shorthand

I think this page is a good idea. In particular, I would appreciate learning to what some of the more esoteric terms one finds in Temple of the Ages refer: t1, t2, t3, eoe, Mop, emo, etc. It would be exactly the kind of thing this page could assist with: a jargon-filled set of abbreviations peculiar to GW. Sjhshh 04:34, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

alternate meanings

A lot of abbreviations have multiple possible meanings e.g. cc meaning "changing character", "Celestial Compass", "cupcake", "candy corn", etc etc... but there's no obvious way to fit those into the table. Mist Y (talk) 21:59, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I deleted a lot of redundant info and some of the less common abbreviations. If people want to know those they can look them up individually. We can try to make a comprehensive list of abbreviations if we really want, but this has never been one, so for now we have a relatively brief list of some very common ones that a new player can read through in a few minutes and hopefully memorize. If they want more information on each item, they can click on the link. The Details column should be kept for additional info about the abbreviation and how it's used. Mist Y (talk) 01:35, 16 February 2018 (UTC)