It seems like there are two camps that need to negotiate a settlement.
Everyone agrees that if you can work the tag organically into the title that it makes a question. But, ...
Will Camp: If you cannot work the tag into the title, always leave it out, that's what tags are for
Jeff Camp: If you cannot work the tag into the title, by all means add it as a prefix to the question, it helps the question to stand alone without tags
Supporting the Will Camp are all the Stack Exchange sites themselves where questions never appear without tags and the Stack Exchange Twitter Accounts where hashtags function as tags.
Supporting the Jeff Camp are "hot questions" in the StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™ and "Stack Exchange question adverts" that both just list a site and a question.
A compromise would be to display question titles with the primary tag as a prefix in all situations where:
- The title does not already contain the tag
- The question isn't in the context of its associated tags
For example:
- Stack Overflow: What OS am I running on? python
- Twitter: What OS am I running on?
#python
- StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™: Python: What OS am I running on?
- Stack Exchange Question Adverts: Python: What OS am I running on?
If this were implemented, then we could systematically remove tags from titles without risking questions that in some situations appear to lack the appropriate tag context.
[PHP/MySQL] ...
, I see that as a problem.