Because they weren't forbidden. Last time this came up we decided they were close enough to the same thing to make no difference. It looks like some wiki vigilante decided to take things into their own hands and 'clean up' the page despite consensus. The previous statement at the bottom of the page was that we knew what initialisms were but that we didn't see the point in making a separate page for them.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Zzzzzzzzzz
Because probably 90% of the people who read the wiki either don't know the technical difference between an acronym and an initialism, or know it but don't really care.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Yeah, this is one of those ones that's someone strange crusade. We need to change the paragraph back to what it was and see if we can get the erroneously deleted examples back.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
As I already said, acrostics are not acronyms; dictionary.com has got this one wrong. An acrostic is the opposite of an acronym; the latter is a new word formed from a phrase, the former is a phrase formed from an old word.
I see the Awesomeness.
It's the popular usage of the word. Therefore, it's right.
Fight smart, not fair.
Yeah, restricting "acronym" to initialisms pronounced as words (e.g. radar, laser, scuba, NATO) is an uphill battle. I just only use it that way myself.
Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.
Maybe split the examples into acrostics and acronyms proper?
The problem with that is, 90% of tropers can't tell the difference. It's just a pedantic division to them.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Invisicomment added. Good, or needs improvement?
she her hers hOI!!! i'm tempeI like it. The description doesn't read like somebody arguing with himself about what "counts", anymore. I especially like the line "Technically it's only an acronym if you pronounce it as one word, and if you spell out the letters, it's an initialism. In practice, most people just use "acronym" for them all." Totally.
Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.
To my mind, this trope reflects the fact that "acronym" is often misused as a false synonym for any type of initialism. Remember that acronyms (new words formed from the initials of a phrase), as far as is known, only go back as far as World War One, and the word "acronym" itself only to World War Two; most examples on the page are actually acrostics (a phrase constructed such that its initials form an already-existing word, or the word thus formed), which are far, far older than acronyms (one example, erroneously called an "acronym" until I corrected it, was the "icthys" phrase, which goes back to the first Christians). I suspect that, if the title is fine, the examples should be cut back to actual acronyms, which means deleting an estimated 95% of examples at least.
Secondly, why do we need the dumb neologism "backronym", either on the page or as a redirect? As pointed out above, the correct term is "acrostic"; acrostics are not acronyms.
Thirdly, since initialisms are forbidden as examples (rightly so; they're even less acronyms than are acrostics), why is there a "Fun With Initialisms" redirect?