Are abbreviations or full words preferred for tag names?

Question

I just created reverse-polish-notation as part of an edit on this question, but on poking around I discovered that rpn already exists and seems to be being used for the same concept. The 20 questions on rpn are few enough that I would happily edit them all individually, but before doing so I thought I should probably establish which is preferred for a tag name, an initialism or the full words?

Answer 1

Abbreviations are often ambiguous. What do you think TLA means? Prefer the long, expressive name whenever possible (there's a 25-character limit).

Here the better tag name is reverse-polish-notation. There doesn't seem to be another meaning of RPN that's relevant to programming, so make rpn a synonym. When two tags are synonyms, the master tag is what is displayed; this should be the most readable version of the name. When someone types rpn, the expansion to reverse-polish-notation provides confirmation of what is meant.

This doesn't apply to technologies that are universally known by their acronym, such as html or sql, for which the acronym is the right tag.

Answer 2

Another factor is that tags can only be 25 characters long. This is why some will be abbreviations and others will be spelt out in full.

In this case it makes sense to set up reverse-polish-notation as a synonym of rpn

Answer 3

If the initial is not ambiguous and is well known (in this case, it is), I would rather see the acronym.

Answer 4

I have seen tags in abbreviated formats like ssis, ssrs.

May be rpn can be a synonym to reverse-polish-notation or the other way around.