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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 ...
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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 ...
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 ...
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Editing is encouraged!, in particular
to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
A good title is an essential part of the question, and the first thing that people see. Your examples (“Hard functional equation”) are indeed bad titles: They tell us nothing about the contents of the question.
So my opinion is:
If you can improve the title of a ...
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 ...
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
We are putting this into our bug-duty rotation and should get to this within a few weeks. (Sorry it's taken 8+ years!)
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 ...
12
Let us turn it around, what does "Question on probability" convey?
The "Question on" is redundant. Everything here ought to be a question. It is not as if we had different types of threads and you had to signal this one is about a question, as opposed to being a review of a book, or announcing a seminar, etc.
Further, the "...
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
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 ...
9
In my opinion, no, you do not need to say in the title that it is a proof-verification --- in fact, you do not even need to say that it is a proof.
Phrases such as
"Prove that", "Proving that", "How to prove", "Solve", "How to solve", "How to show", etc. in titles usually don't add any meaning to a question. That is to say,
These phrases should be used in ...
8
many questions are in need of edits however only have the first letter of the title to be capitalised
In fact [if that's the only problem] they are not in need of edit. I see that you're bringing old questions on the front page (both on Main and on Meta) by just capitalising the first letter in the title (or just adding one word before math). Please stop — ...
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