File names for styles with an initialism as their official name

[adunning]

The style requirements file states that the file name of a style should be 'based on its title':

styles/STYLE_REQUIREMENTS.md

Line 58 in c746136

The file name of a style should be based on its title.

This has resulted in inconsistency in the naming of styles known officially by an initialism such as APA, MHRA, and MLA. Currently, we have:

APA

File name: apa.csl
Style title: American Psychological Association 7th edition
Published source title: Publication manual of the American Psychological Association: the official guide to APA style

MHRA

File name: modern-humanities-research-association-*.csl
Style title: Modern Humanities Research Association 4th edition
Published source title: MHRA style guide: a handbook for authors, editors, and writers of theses

This is especially confusing because it represents the 4th edition of the MHRA Style Guide, but the 9th edition of the style of the Modern Humanities Research Association.

MLA

File name: modern-language-association-*.csl
Style title: Modern Language Association 9th edition
Published source title: MLA handbook

For consistency, I would like to propose either that APA be renamed to american-psychological-association.csl or that MHRA/MLA be renamed to mhra-*.csl (etc.).

I would suggest naming files with an initialism where it is the official published name. It would be useful, for example, with the DOI Citation Formatter, which lists styles by the CSL file name, and I expect that users will search for 'MLA' before 'modern-language-association'.

[bwiernik]

I think it's reasonable for MHRA and MLA to be named for their initialism given that they are generic styles and virtually universally (and officially) called by the initialism.

@adam3smith you know more about the context and history of these file names. Any concerns?

[adam3smith]

As long as we use filenames as IDs (or rather, have them be identical) I think (and Zotero at least has been quite clear on this) we should avoid unnecessary file renaming; they can cause upstream problems, especially in popular styles. This has never caused any actual problems so I would like to just leave it alone.
I agree the current naming isn't consistent, of course and going with the acronyms throughout may have made sense, but this to me seems like a technical debt with no actual costs.

[bwiernik]

That's fair, and for the DOI cite interface, they really should be using a title/short title interface rather than a drop down with style ID/filename. Closing for now.

[adunning]

Would it be safe and desirable to change the MHRA and MLA style titles to match the official publications (i.e. MHRA Style Guide and MLA Handbook) without changing the file names? The publisher name could be moved to title-short to keep it searchable.

[bwiernik]

That would be fine. Makes sense to match the official names (though we don't need to do the full book title for APA)

[adunning]

I've made individual PRs for some of the more prominent changes resulting from using official style titles: #7928, #7925, #7924, #7923, #7922, #7921, #7920, #7918, #7879, #7813, #7510.

There are multiple ways in which one could present several of the names. For example, 'American Psychological Association' or 'APA Style' would arguably make equal sense from the official title of the Publication Manual. I have suggested the latter to match the website title, but I don't have a strong opinion on this.

@adam3smith I felt that renaming the CSE styles counted as necessary, because the variants were difficult to keep straight without doing so, and they aren't in Zotero by default. It would also be ideal to rename vancouver.csl and friends with official terminology, as it would make the relationships between the files much clearer, but I'm guessing that one is too popular to modify?

I remembered that we renamed modern-humanities-research-association.csl to modern-humanities-research-association-notes.csl over the summer, because the additional variants would similarly have been too confusing otherwise. This revealed a bug in the Zotero quick copy not taking renamed styles into account, but they fixed that very quickly, and I'm not aware of any other adverse effects from that. I can see that MLA is probably best left alone, but would MHRA be sufficiently unpopular to permit renaming these to mhra-*.csl?