Dzmitry Kazimirchyk wrote:
I think AST (a.k.a Arabia Standard Time) in its both full and abbreviated forms is used to denote time in Iraq both locally and internationally and it was not the TZ database who first introduced this tradition.
No, I introduced the abbreviation "AST" for Arabia Standard Time in the 1990s, as part of my contributions to the tz database. As far as I know it was not part of any local or international convention. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the controversy over what "MSK" stands for, though, ...
there is a wide agreement that "Minsk time" and "Moscow time" are not the same terms
Yes.
community should have picked the abbreviation as per standard procedure
The dispute here is over what the "standard procedure" is. The guidelines mainly attempt to record the informal thought processes I used while contributing to the tz database since the early 1990s. These processes produced many abbreviations that I invented purely because the database format required *something* even though no abbreviations were actually in common use. Here's an example of what these thought processes produced: since 1998 in the tz database the abbreviation MMT has stood for both "Minsk Mean Time" (in use 1924-1930) and "Moscow Mean Time" (1916-1918). The analogy to MSK should be obvious.
3. I've brought up an example of Kazakhstan
Sure, and Kazakhstan uses (for lack of a better term) an "Asiatic" style, which I invented only because *something* is required there, and which has never really caught on in English-language usage. It's better not to invent more abbreviations like that if we don't have to, as seems to be the case here. (Plus, we wouldn't want to confuse non-expert users into thinking that Minsk is in Asia....)