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Math.SE has a problem with titles. The percentage of questions with the redundant word question in the title is highest on Stack Exchange, by far. Plenty of titles consist of other mostly useless words. We have a nice meta post on writing a good title, but nobody's got time for meta posts.

On Stack Overflow, the words question, doubt, problem, and help cannot be used in titles. They result in a pop-up message directing user to a post about writing a good title:

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On Mathematics, problem has several legitimate uses (e.g., in differential equations), and question is legitimate in questions about Minkowski's question mark function. Some other such cases may exist. In view of the above, my proposal is to issue a non-blocking warning when the title contains one of generally useless words. More specifically:

A question title under 40 characters containing one of the words "question", "problem", "doubt" and "help" is very likely to be bad, and should generate a warning.

Something like this already exists: if the title contains the word you, the following message is shown (it does not block the submission).

you

The message should be different, though:

The title of your question may be insufficiently specific. See Writing Good Titles.

Clarification: the filter is intended for main site only, not for meta.

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    $\begingroup$ So if I would like to ask something like "Blabla's doubt regarding the solution of Whitehead's Problem" which may be a valid title is going to be banned? $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 19:51
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    $\begingroup$ IMHO, instead of a pop-up saying "strong discouraged", it will be more effective if it cost the user 'something' to use certain keyword. e.g. question : 2 point, doubt : 2 point, help : 5 point and homework : 100 points! $\endgroup$
    – achille hui
    Aug 12, 2014 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ (I'm all in favor of automatic filtering titles; but I do think this needs to be discussed thoroughly before doing anything.) $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 19:54
  • $\begingroup$ What about "problem"? $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 20:06
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    $\begingroup$ @achillehui Unfortunately, many of posters of such titles have nothing to lose. (A related idea is to drop the word filter beyond some reputation level, which I think was floated at some point on meta.SO). Asaf: what about "what about "problem""? I addressed this word in the post. $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Aug 12, 2014 at 20:18
  • $\begingroup$ No, I meant what about the "problem" problem in my suggested title referring to Whitehead's Problem? Even if you don't use the word "doubt", "Whitehead's Problem" is a name for a mathematical problem. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 20:38
  • $\begingroup$ Other examples can be of the family of "What are some open problems in functional analysis that can be explained to undergrad students?" $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 20:39
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    $\begingroup$ Yeah, okay. This is a definitive proof that I am going to sleep. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 12, 2014 at 20:48
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    $\begingroup$ This is only for the main site, right? For meta, we may need to mention such words in titles. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Aug 12, 2014 at 22:43
  • $\begingroup$ @900 Thanks. Probably most MSE users have no experience with how it works on SO, so it would be helpful to mention that explicitly in the question. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Aug 12, 2014 at 22:55
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    $\begingroup$ How would this handle a question about "Minkowski's Question Mark Function," for example? I would not support using the symbol "?" instead of "question mark" because it would be harder to search for and possibly confusing. $\endgroup$
    – Brad
    Aug 12, 2014 at 23:38
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    $\begingroup$ @GerryMyerson Demonstrating that mathematicians are generally bad in writing titles. "On a question of Erdős", "on a polynomial inequality", etc. I would edit those at once if they appeared on Stack Exchange. $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Aug 12, 2014 at 23:59
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    $\begingroup$ @900sit-upsaday: Please provide an email address, so I could contact you and make sure none of my titles are bad. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 13, 2014 at 0:54
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    $\begingroup$ @AsafKaragila Just post the paper here prior to sending it to journal. Or instead of. $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Aug 13, 2014 at 0:56
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    $\begingroup$ Please provide me the university you're currently sitting as the chair of the hiring committee, so when I submit my application with only one published paper (the one I published recently, before accepting this great advice), the committee will know why this is the situation. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Aug 13, 2014 at 0:57

1 Answer 1

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Ok, there's a warning now:

The title of your question may be insufficiently specific.

This is triggered by a title matching 

^.{0,30}(^|\W)(anyone|difficult|doubt|easy|hard|help|interesting|please|problem|query|question|someone|stuck|very)(\W|$).{0,30}$

...so it heavily favors short titles - Tricky integration/functions problem would've warned, while Least squares problem equivalent to solving Poisson problem for graph embedding given edge lengths would not have.

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  • $\begingroup$ Can this be enabled elsewhere? $\endgroup$
    – Braiam
    Oct 8, 2014 at 13:30
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    $\begingroup$ @Braiam You'll probably need another set of words for Ubuntu. The one in Shog9's answer came from a community effort to identify signs of weak titles specific to this site. $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Oct 8, 2014 at 14:27
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    $\begingroup$ Please add word boundaries when you get a chance: this warning is triggered by questions about Hardy spaces (matching "hard"). $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Oct 15, 2015 at 21:19
  • $\begingroup$ Done, @NormalHuman $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Oct 15, 2015 at 21:27

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