50
I agree. Right now there is a smallish list of words that will cause a warning to pop up when they appear in short question titles . From Shog9's answer the regex is
^.{0,30}(^|\W)(anyone|difficult|doubt|easy|hard|help|interesting|please|problem|query|question|someone|stuck|very)(\W|$).{0,30}$
(Essentially a title containing at least one of the listed ...
36
In addition to the below title-specific $\rm\LaTeX$ guidelines, there is of course the MathJax tutorial and quick reference.
The primary rule for using $\rm\LaTeX$ in titles is to be vertically terse. Try to make your title take up as little vertical space as possible (the height of $\sum\limits_{n=1}^\infty$ is an approximate upper bound for what is ...
23
Ok, there's a warning now:
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 ...
23
What makes a good title?
Good titles should unambiguously tell the user what they are getting into before they click on it. The goal is to attract the attention of those people who have the expertise to answer the question or may be interested in an answer, while not wasting the time of readers who don't care. Perversely enough, a good title might decrease ...
22
One should first note that only a few StackExchange sites have MathJax capabilities. Add in the fact that such questions appear only rarely and it is probably unlikely that SE will implement a change to require titles to have non-$\LaTeX$ elements anytime soon.
There is, of course, a simple work-around that requires no changes to the SE system:
When ...
20
I'm for it. I have been making an effort lately to do this myself. I am sick of seeing titles like "Proof about a semigroup" (an example taken from the front page right at this moment). This provides absolutely no information, and there's no reason why the title can't be "In a semigroup, $ab=ba\Rightarrow (ab)^k=a^kb^k$." In fact, I don't see any reason ...
19
There is nothing wrong in being witty.
But. Question titles should be descriptive. As the help message for the title field puts it
What's your math question? Be specific
That's especially important nowadays when there are lots and lots questions on Math.SE.
Good question titles are like (random examples from the current main page) 'If $f:X\to Y$ is ...
18
I am going to use this post to catalog words that should generally not appear in question titles:
anyone (200 results)
difficult (59 185 results)
doubt (332 results)
easy (124 318 results)
hard (61 183 results)
help (1245 3854 results)
interesting (141 345 results)
please (625 results)
problem (2719 7661 results)
query (58 results)
question (3920 10568 ...
17
Background
The use of block (displayed) equations ($$...$$) in question titles has been disallowed on Mathematics Stack Exchange. Titles are meant to be short descriptions of the question, and using block equations generally causes your equations to be larger: compare $$\lim_{n \to \infty} \frac{1}{n}$$ to $\lim_{n \to \infty} \frac{1}{n}$ which produce $$\...
17
As long as you have the energy to do so, please continue to correct such edits/titles.
Unless you have reason not to, assume the editors are well-meaning and just don't know that \displaystyle should generally not be used in titles, and address a comment to them - editors of a question can be @-pinged, although their username does not appear in the auto-...
13
I think your title is better as a title. But, we want users to write informative titles and 'the question again' is in a way the best we can realistically aim for. The alternative would likely be to have "Question on supremum 13" not what you wrote. If I recall correctly, there is even a recommendation somewhere "Make your question your title." This then is ...
12
I think to avoid it completely might not be the way to go; and there would also be too much opposition against this.
What I think would be good is that users are aware of some of the downsides of MathJax and formulas in general in titles and take these downsides into account when choosing their titles.
This can also be small things, like, choosing ...
12
I'm surprised this doesn't have an answer yet. Yes, it's okay, and even encouraged.
More or less the same rules apply as when editing the body of a post; in particular, don't make drastic changes to the meaning of the question. And the title should reflect the question that is more fully expressed in the body of the post.
12
Proposal: Defining macros in the titles should be strongly discouraged and we should ask Stack Exchange to add them to blacklisted phrases in the titles.1 This would mean blacklisting: \DeclareMathoperator, \newcommand, \renewcommand, \def\ in the titles.2,3,4 Possibly also \let - as pointed out by Hagen von Eitzen in the comments.
Here are some problems ...
12
First let me stress that I certainly agree that there is a problem with 'lazy' titles. A strategy I noticed is to to add adhoc numbering.
That said, you wrote:
as you can see in the edit history, it originally said "Isomorophism between modules"
However, in actual fact originally it said "isomorophic of module" where the motivation does not apply ...
11
We are putting this into our bug-duty rotation and should get to this within a few weeks. (Sorry it's taken 8+ years!)
11
Questions from math.SE that contain LaTeX markup are excluded from the list of hot network questions; see this meta.SE thread.
On the other hand, questions from other sites that contain $ signs in them are still picked up, and when they show up on math.SE mathjax processes them, which often gives horrible results; see there for example. (I don't believe ...
11
A linked question contained some malicious code in the title. I've removed it.
10
As someone who often uses a device that makes MathJax slow, I think MathJax should definitely be allowed in titles, and used for any equations in titles, but avoided when reasonable. When the problem is easily described in words, that is great; otherwise, readable, consistent equations are worth the bother. I would not endorse using MathJax to make bold text ...
10
Markdown doesn't work in titles, so occasionally people will use MathJax as an approximation.
$quod\;erat\;demonstrandum$ produces $quod\;erat\;demonstrandum$
Please don't do this; honestly, trivial formatting is not necessary in a ...
10
Rude or offensive content is proscribed. Is there ever a case where a word can in context be unoffensive, despite being so in normal conversation? I'm willing to think it might, so generally cases are handled by community moderation, not by programmatic embargo. This means that if the first edit to remove offensive/rude content gets rolled back by the OP, ...
10
Yes, there is no such thing as "obsolete question" on the SE. If you can improve a post, question or answer, then improve. It doesn't matter, how old it is.
If you edit a question title, or make any minor change, then it is strongly adviced to fix also any other problems in the post, if there is.
However, editing a post bumps it to the homepage, thus don't ...
10
If you put the effort to properly write up a question, putting the extra bit of having a proper title should not be an issue.
Laziness is not an excuse.
Put the reference in the question's body, otherwise, stick to leaving the title informative for those who don't have the book at hand. If you plan on asking a question that only your teacher and classmates ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
