Wikidata:Property proposal/initialism

Initialism

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Not done

Description	abbreviation containing only first letters of an expression (regardless if pronounced as letters or as a word)
Data type	Monolingual text
Example 1	United States of America (Q30)initialismUSA
Example 2	Holy Roman Empire (Q12548)initialismHRE
Example 3	National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Q23548)initialismNASA
Example 4	Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Q358834)initialismFCDO
Example 5	Changpeng Zhao (Q52714313)initialismCZ
Source	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature
Planned use	being able to relocate the initialisms from short name (P1813) in order to change them to "longer" short names, like "United Kingdom"
See also	short name (P1813)

Motivation

The reaction of my question Wikidata:Project_chat#Property:P1813_short_name_with_countries was, that there should be a new property, to be able to move the initialisms used in short name (P1813) to there and to restrict that one to actual short names without using initialisms. This is what I'm trying to do here. Although I have been active on Wikipedia for over a decade, I'm a novice to Wikidata. Therefore this is my first request of this kind. I didn't know how to fill in some of the fields and I would really appreciate someone helping out there.

The further motivation is being able to use short country names for generation of historical place names in the browser extension WikiTree BEE, but I assume others might be happy to have more "handy" names as well, that are not completely abbreviated.

Thanks and kind regards --Flominator (talk) 10:02, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

An initialism should be just initials, so Orange is a bad example. It includes acronyms (which you should be able to pronounce as words), but also tongue-twisting jumbles of letters. Its key requirement is that its a sequence of initial letters extracted from a title that are commonly used to describe it. Normally all capitals, but sometimes mixed (eg SoHo (Q461572))

Some short name (P1813) are initialisms, but not all, and it will help for countries like United States of America (Q30) (United States, States, US, USA), or organisation like the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Q358834) ("Foreign Office", "FCO", "FCDO" ect)

it need not be single valued. I'd see it being used in addition to short name (P1813), not replacing it. The key question is whether there are enough examples to make it worth having a new property, rather than having a initialism (Q918270) qualifier to the existing property. What property should be used for the qualifier? Vicarage (talk) 10:26, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I removed Orange (that was an example for short name (P1813), my bad) and added FCDO instead. Yes, the idea would not be to replace short name (P1813), but be able to completely remove the abbreviation aspect from it, in order to only use it for shorted forms. --Flominator (talk) 11:16, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

•  Support This seems reasonable to me - I do have a question about the domain for this property. The examples are all organizations (or a country), but presumably anything that is (sometimes) referred to only by initials would qualify? Like CZ for Changpeng Zhao (Q52714313)? ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:56, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

I must admit, that I had never heard of CZ, but instantly came up with JFK instead. Good point, though. I added CZ as example. --Flominator (talk) 07:44, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

•  Neutral Those that created short name (P1813) should be aware of this property proposal as it aiming at splitting "short but not too short words" // "very short or only first letters" that are currently inside short name (P1813). Would there be people doing the job of splitting the current content of short name (P1813) ?Bouzinac ^{💬●✒️●💛} 14:21, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
•  Oppose I wouldn't mind a separate property for abbreviations, but this won't achieve what you want it to achieve. There are various ways to make abbreviations which are not initialisms, and a single abbreviation can combine more than one method. Those would not belong in this property and creating a separate property for every single type (and combination of types) that can be used would make the data hard to enter/use. I think it would make more sense to use something like object of statement has role (P3831) as a qualifier. - Nikki (talk) 06:45, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

   Oppose your argument has convinced me that documenting qualifiers to short name (P1813) is the way to go. Vicarage (talk) 07:24, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  Can you please show me as example, how that would look like for UK or USA? --Flominator (talk) 14:09, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  United States of America (Q30) modified. Vicarage (talk) 14:19, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  That's also a way. Thank you. Should this be put in the property documentation? Flominator (talk) 16:00, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  Done for short name (P1813) Vicarage (talk) 05:53, 2 September 2024 (UTC)


SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?initials WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en-GB,en,mul". }
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q6256;
  p:P1813 [ ps:P1813 ?initials; pq:P3831 wd:Q918270].
}

Try it!

Vicarage (talk) 16:37, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

•  Not done, no consensus of proposed property at this time based on the above discussion. Regards, ZI Jony ^(Talk) 18:47, 16 September 2024 (UTC)