# Should we retitle posts whose titles contain “interesting”?

Today I changed the title of the question "Interesting Mathematical Induction Series Proof" to the more informative "Induction proof of lower bound for $\sum \sqrt n$". It occurred to me that most titles that contain "interesting" are similarly vague. A search confirmed this. Not every title with "interesting" was completely useless, but most were.

There are 113 of these. I thought that giving them better titles might cause them to appear more often in relevant searches, or make it easier to select them as relevant or irrelevant when they do appear in searches. On the other hand, perhaps they are likely to be poor-quality questions, so perhaps it is a good thing that they have such a clear indicator of low quality in their titles. And perhaps it's not a good idea to bump 113 questions that are likely to be poor-quality.

I don't know. Is there value in trying to change the titles of these "interesting" posts?

(Related: Gerry Myerson asks for More informative titles. Asaf Karagila discusses "interesting" in How should we treat subjective titles?. Peter Tamaroff asks about Subjective titles. T.. suggests that we avoid nebulous adjectives in question titles.)

• Too bad one can't edit posts like this. I'd have retitled it to expunge "interesting". – Rick Decker Sep 5 '12 at 13:06
• After that, we can work on the titles that contain the word "tricky". – user940 Sep 5 '12 at 16:52
• There are of course boundary cases: How would one address the [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox interestinmg number paradox] in the title? – Hagen von Eitzen Sep 5 '12 at 17:34
• @Rick: I did not use the word "interesting" in my title. I used the word '"interesting"'. I had hoped that everyone would be able to tell the difference. – MJD Sep 6 '12 at 2:18
• @MJD Of course I had considered that in making my comment. I had hoped that everyone would be able to tell the difference between " ' "interesting" ' " and ' "interesting" '. [It's too bad that markdown doesn't allow one to insert thinspaces where needed.] – Rick Decker Sep 7 '12 at 2:14
• There may be a correlation-causation difficulty here, inasmuch it is not the presence of "interesting" that makes a question title bad, merely that people who don't know how to make an interesting question will put "interesting" in the title in the hope that asserting it will make it so. – Ben Millwood Sep 9 '12 at 1:31
• @Ben I'm really only interested in the correlation. Many questions with "interesting" in the title can be easily improved, so looking for "interesting" is a good way to locate low-hanging fruit. – MJD Sep 9 '12 at 1:39
• @MJD: oh, certainly it's useful if there is a correlation, and there seems to be. I'm just warning people not to get carried away with their inferences. – Ben Millwood Sep 9 '12 at 10:17
• Out of curiosity, what would you think of this question (which I posted earlier) with regards to the title? Should I edit the title? math.stackexchange.com/questions/770763/… – Ayesha Jun 2 '14 at 19:28
• @Ayesha I'm not sure what a good title would be, but I think “interesting” adds nothing to the title you have. – MJD Jun 2 '14 at 19:37
• @Ayesha I agree with MJD: "interesting" does not add anything. Short of putting a formula in the title, you can describe it as Limit of a sequence defined by a two-step nonlinear recursion. – user147263 Jun 2 '14 at 19:50