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Fallout: New Vegas / FNV
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Help me out here, because this sure seems like a case of rules preventing the improvement of Wikipedia. It's eminently verifiable that Fallout: New Vegas is commonly abbreviated as FNV. Looking back in the page history, I can see I'm not the first to add it. Using a Firefox private window, the game was in multiple first-page results in a search for the letters on Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. (There was also a company we have an article on but was not previously listed. I added it, so that's something!) I could follow the advice of WP:DABABBREV and add it to the article, but... is that helpful, or just clutter? To be totally honest, I'd only be doing it to support the entry on the disambiguation page.
If you can consider all this and decide yes, the status quo is really in the best interests of readers, I'll leave it alone. --BDD (talk) 14:56, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
- Are you saying that the subject of the article at "Fallout: New Vegas" is widely known or referred to, in reliable sources, as "FNV", and you think adding that context for readers there (IAW the manual of style) would be unhelpful or clutter? Its a long-standing SOP to add sourced abbreviations to articles, under the presumption they're helpful to readers; I see them often. Not only do we have a whole MOS to help editors therewith, but the very existence of this DABMOS section presupposes that abbreviations are added to articles when they're verifiable and sourced.I'm unfamiliar with the subject matter, but I'll assume good faith on your part that such an abbreviation is common and reliably-sourcable; would you prefer that I do the research and edit that target article to include the abbreviation and sources? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 18:15, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
- Yep, that's a good summary of it. Maybe this is just a quirk of me as a reader, but I often dislike it when the first sentence of an article has a bunch of "stylized as...", "abbreviated as...", etc., especially when it's really obvious. Much more informative when it's not a logical abbreviation, e.g., OWL for Web Ontology Language. About this game specifically, the official website we have linked is even /fnv-overview.html.
- To use another gaming example, the Mortal Kombat franchise is often abbreviated MK. The abbreviation is used in the article, but there's no sourced statement of "This franchise commonly abbreviated MK." And the franchise is listed at the Mk disambiguation page. Is there a good example of a page that follows this DABABBREV requirement well? Another video game would be nice, so it could be an apples-to-apples comparison. --BDD (talk) 18:57, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
- No worries! I don't mind helping if I can; I'll walk you through my process as I try.First, I'll check the online sources cited in the article itself, see if there're any obvious contenders that aren't subject-matter specific; there's 118 sources currently, so there should be some good contenders. And... I was surprisingly wrong; I only found one general-audience source (USA Today) cited in the article, and it didn't abbreviate the game's name at all. Next I looked at all the source titles in the article, and only two abbreviated the game at all: both were from Eurogamer, and abbreviated the game differently each time: "Fallout: NV" once, and "F: NV" the second, though the article prose itself neither mentions or even uses the initialism. Not being able to recognize nor evaluate the rest of the sources by glance, and disinclined to open them all individually, I'm moving on.Next I checked offline reliable sources (through various databases), but no combination of "FNV" and "New Vegas" or "Fallout" came up with anything video-game related out of the 18 hits. Similarly, I tried broadly searching the web for the same combinations, but all I found were informal uses like forums, URLs, fan sites & videos, and similar.I guess it's back to the article and its 117 other sources. Of those that were online and alive, only three came close to what you're looking for. One was VG247 using the abbreviation "F:NV" and the other two were the Eurogamer pages already mentioned. From the sources that've been used by Wikipedians in this 14.12-year-old article, there's hardly any use of abbreviations at all, much less any indication or explicit mention of one being used commonly.At this point I'm at a loss to adhere to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Use sourceable abbreviations. Do you have any links to reliable sources that write using the "FNV" abbreviation, or even mention its use outright? In the meantime, I'll post at Talk:Fallout: New Vegas#abbreviation of title and see if the editors there can help (presumably being better versed in the topic than we). — Fourthords | =Λ= | 22:53, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
- It's occurred to me that I'm approaching this from the perspective of a long-term WP:RFD veteran, someone who thinks a lot about how users may search and how to accommodate them. I see disambiguation pages as navigational aids, same as redirects. For me, the combination of verifiability, utility to users, and the repeated good-faith attempts to add it to this page make a much stronger case than MOS guidance that clearly is not followed in many cases.
- I don't think I'll be able to meet that standard; nor will I understand it. --BDD (talk) 21:33, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
- No worries! I don't mind helping if I can; I'll walk you through my process as I try.First, I'll check the online sources cited in the article itself, see if there're any obvious contenders that aren't subject-matter specific; there's 118 sources currently, so there should be some good contenders. And... I was surprisingly wrong; I only found one general-audience source (USA Today) cited in the article, and it didn't abbreviate the game's name at all. Next I looked at all the source titles in the article, and only two abbreviated the game at all: both were from Eurogamer, and abbreviated the game differently each time: "Fallout: NV" once, and "F: NV" the second, though the article prose itself neither mentions or even uses the initialism. Not being able to recognize nor evaluate the rest of the sources by glance, and disinclined to open them all individually, I'm moving on.Next I checked offline reliable sources (through various databases), but no combination of "FNV" and "New Vegas" or "Fallout" came up with anything video-game related out of the 18 hits. Similarly, I tried broadly searching the web for the same combinations, but all I found were informal uses like forums, URLs, fan sites & videos, and similar.I guess it's back to the article and its 117 other sources. Of those that were online and alive, only three came close to what you're looking for. One was VG247 using the abbreviation "F:NV" and the other two were the Eurogamer pages already mentioned. From the sources that've been used by Wikipedians in this 14.12-year-old article, there's hardly any use of abbreviations at all, much less any indication or explicit mention of one being used commonly.At this point I'm at a loss to adhere to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Use sourceable abbreviations. Do you have any links to reliable sources that write using the "FNV" abbreviation, or even mention its use outright? In the meantime, I'll post at Talk:Fallout: New Vegas#abbreviation of title and see if the editors there can help (presumably being better versed in the topic than we). — Fourthords | =Λ= | 22:53, 2 June 2023 (UTC)