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There are situations in which it is desirable to have a tag exist under both the full name and an abbreviation. I believe it we have consensus that in such cases one should be a synonym for the other.

But which should be the canonical tag name and which should be the synonym?

Two previous meta questions are pointing in different directions, so which is it?

Prefer abbreviated tag names or prefer full tag names.

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I don't think we're going to be able to come up with an effective rule to determine one way or the other. Sometimes it's logical to have the full name with the initialism as a synonym, other times it would just be silly.

For examples, these I think would be best suited as having the full name for the master tag with initialisms as synonyms:

On the other hand, it would be silly to have these tags:

I think the most logical determining factor is popularity. Wikipedia is usually a pretty good indicator of the most common term.

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  • Yup, agree with this. Have the abbreviations as synonyms.
    – enderland
    Commented Sep 18, 2015 at 13:58
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    I like this answer. I hadn't thought about scenarios where the non-abbreviated name is sillily long. But now that you mention it, I realize that there are some extreme cases. We wouldn't want personal-computer-memory-card-international-association.
    – kasperd
    Commented Sep 18, 2015 at 14:06

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