Post History

I was the one who started that list Elsewhere.  I thought the same as you, that a few common abbreviations would be good to have in a single place.

However, it quickly turned into a mess.  After only a few days I could see it was a mistake.

People added whatever obscure abbreviations they could think of, seemingly trying to outdo others with how many abbreviations they could post.  A few even used it to push their favorite uncommon abbreviation somewhat as a political statement.

Voting on such a list also doesn't make sense.  It became more of a popularity contest than a measure of quality.  Such a list should be in alphabetical order.  Your suggestion of using a Paper for the list does get around the voting and sorting problem, but not the other problems.

Elsewhere has shown that crowd-sourcing reference information just doesn't work.  No matter how much you try to explain the single coherent vision for what should be in the reference and how it should be organized, people do what they want to.  The result is inevitably a mess.

The only way this might work is if <i>one</i> person wrote the list, but that's not workable.  Everyone can edit.  What are you going to do when someone adds an abbreviation that is obscure enough to detract from the whole instead of adding to it, even though the definition is well-written and formatted?  That will lead to endless whines on meta about <i>"Why did my perfectly correct abbreviation get deleted?"</i>.

Without a lot of heavy moderation, this won't work.  We're all volunteers here.  I don't want to waste my volunteer time on dealing with the inevitable bickering and whining.  The upside just isn't big enough.