Titles should be stand-alone summaries of questions *without* depending on tags

Question

Titles should be completely independent of tags. A good title tells an expert whether they want to read the full question all by itself.

I know this has come up multiple times before, before, but in each case, the discussion has seemed to have turned into a different question. For example,

Should questions include "tags" in their titles? really asks, "Don't we need tags in titles to help with SEO"?

So, "no, we don't, because we add the top tag (or two, in some cases) to the crawler results," is correct, but it appears that people are interpreting that to mean that people generally can (or should) omit key terms from their titles if they exist in the tags.

To be clear:

• I agree that we should never force a tag into a title if it's not helpful; Why didn't my beer cake cook properly? should NOT have "[Baking]:" jammed into the title, because it adds nothing to a reader's understanding of what it's about, BUT...

• Nothing should be left out of a title just because it exists in the tags.

Trilogy examples: How do I make a machine "blank screen" for a period of time (as a penalty) if certain noise levels are reached?, What is the purpose of the holes marked "Do Not Cover" on hard drives?, What's wrong with always being root?

Arqade examples: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/68710/how-is-experience-divided-in-multiplayer, What actions reward experience?, Ways to earn experience-points,

The problem with all of these is that without a language, OS, or game title, they fail to convey whether you care to read the question, because you need to read the tags to even figure out if you work with the language or own the game in question.

A term being in a tag in no way reduces the need for it in the title. Tags are great for filtering, but a title is supposed to function like a headline.

This is a good headline:

This is not very good headline:

Titles, like headlines, are BIG AND BOLD on the front and other pages. So you can browse and stuff. Tags are small, and kind of low contrast. So they don't, you know, distract you from the headlines.

Bear in mind that on non-technical sites, new visitors, even new experts, don't necessarily even know what tags are.

The title test:

If you assume the reader can't even see the tags, is your title a good, stand-alone summary of the question for an expert on that topic?

I'm sticking with gaming examples because they're more broadly accessible than some topics:

Why do zerglings with speed beat normal zerglings? does not need, "in Starcraft" added, because it's impossible to be interested in the answer and not know that a zergling question relates to Starcraft.

but...

Besides practicing, what are some great ways to become a better player?, absolutely needs "...in Starcraft 2" added to it, because without the tags, it's currently useless as a way to decide if you want to read it.

This is really no change from Jeff Atwood's comment:

In the wake of that comment, people seemed to mostly hear:

"stop forcing a word you don't need in just cuz it's a tag"

... which is right, but what it really says is,

"most of the time, some tags will naturally belong in a title that effectively summarizes the question".

EDIT: Some folks felt this was (an unduly public) way to call out gaming specifically. It's not - I think this is a problem to varying degrees on a number of sites, but used examples from gaming because they're easy for most readers to follow. Sincere apologies to anyone in the Arqade community who felt I was using a network-wide forum to criticize a gaming practice - I wanted to clarify the best practice for all the sites that encounter this at least sometimes, including SO, where you still see people stripping languages from titles in edits sometimes.

Answer 1

I agree, but I don't quite understand why this needs a new question; hasn't this been the generally accepted "community" decision for a very long time, at least on Stack Overflow?

This I dislike

Python: How can I access the first element of a dictionary

This I don't mind (I think the "in Python" is fairly unnecessary but can accept that others disagree):

Accessing the first element of a dictionary in Python

and this is also fine:

Access the first element of a Python dictionary

The highest upvoted answer in Should questions include "tags" in their titles? has a similar example:

The only time you should use tags in your title is when they are organic to the conversational tone of the title. For example,

JavaScript, jQuery: When should I use one or the other?

is an example of forcing tags in order to compensate for a lousy title. The title would be much clearer if rewritten thusly:

Can I use jQuery to foo the bar on the baz, or am I stuck using plain JavaScript?

Answer 2

We've actually dealt with the "Game Name in title" issue for a very long time. Based on the experience we've had running the site, along with our discussions, we've come to the conclusions that the best way to convey the game is via the tag. Having the game name in the title is great, but only if it naturally fits there. Adding "In Starcaft 2" at the end of every post often makes titles feel less natural and concise. Natural and concise titles are key aspects of being a good title and using tags to convey the game name is one way we make concise and natural titles.

I guess what I'm ultimately saying is that I feel the rule that "Title should be stand-alone" is a little too narrow since it:

• Ignores the fact tags exist and their placement in the site makes them prominent to any users looking through the question list
• Assumes that "stand alone" is the only factor in what makes a good title. Like I said above, being concise and natural is also important.

With that said, I think a more sensible rule (and is basically what we follow on Arqade) is that "The Title and Tags should be enough to tell an expert if the question interests them."

Answer 3

You're going against a long established practice on SE sites with this argument. Space is valuable, and titles that are long enough to wrap and occupy two lines are generally a bad idea. You further encouraged the princpiple of omitting the primary tag by adding the most important tag to the HTML title, so if a user actually adds the game to the title they'll have a negative effect on SEO because the game name is at the end of the title instead of the front where it would be if it was automatically added.

Your proposal would mean that most questions on SO would have to include the progamming language in their title, and most questions on Arqade the name of the game. Both sites tend to avoid this unless the titles are really short.

For me personally, on SO I would not gain anything by having the programming language in the title as I always browse SO by tags. It is just so huge that it does not make sense to just look at the frontpage.

Of course it would be useful to immediately know which game a question on Arqade belongs to. But that information is already in the tags, it should not be necessary to repeat it. That the game a question is about is not immediately obvious on Arqade is just a failure of the current UI for this case. We, the users of Arqade, have long argued that game tags are special and deserve some additional features. I personally would go even further and argue that Arqade should be structures around games and not tags, but I understand that this would be a huge development effort for a single site.

If some sites like SO and Arqade have a tag that almost always should be in the title according to your criteria, then the SE software should support this case.

I personally even include the game name on Arqade for short titles, but in general this is just not reliable enough because many titles are long enough that including the name of the game would be rather painful.

Answer 4

I have to agree with the others here: Tags can very well be supplementary to the title.

This is for a simple reason: The way the search currently works - reasonably so - makes it a little hard to locate a question, if the data in the tags isn't included somewhere outside the tags. Otherwise it does indeed require knowledge of search queries and the tags for the search to find the results one is looking for.

This does not mean that we should cram all the important data into the title, though.

• The title should describe the problem at hand.
• The question body should describe the circumstances.
• Tags should allow for filtering and quick reading of the question list.

So, to sum this up:

• A question that doesn't contain all the information without the tags is incomplete.
• Title + Tags should contain all important data.

Answer 5

Now that I've listened to the Stack Overflow Podcast (#47), I understand the point of view you're trying to get across quite a bit more. I agree that the correct way to be handling this, rather specifically from an Arqade point of view (since that's where I spend most of my time and that's the site mentioned so much during the podcast) is to do the following;

• Make a way for us to denote that a tag is 'the topic of conversation', in our instance, this would be the name of the game
• Make these tags very prominent next to the game title

While I agree that some of our titles make it difficult to understand what game is being spoken about without referring to the tags, I do not believe the correct way of dealing with this issue is to edit the game name into each title to specify which game is being discussed as this leads to things like question titles wrapping onto multiple lines, horrible titles like "Game Name: Question?" or "Question - Game Name" which, in my opinion, is a further step back than our current titles.

Ultimately, this issue only exists within Stack Exchange, as any question on the site will appear with the tags prefixed before the title in the page title, on search engines, etc - therefore it should be dealt with within the Stack Exchange engine, rather than changing the way titles are currently formed.

Answer 6

Why do zerglings with speed beat normal zerglings? does not need, "in Starcraft" added, because it's impossible to be interested in the answer and not know that a zergling question relates to Starcraft.

That's a very poor example as you're not guaranteed it works across all games that contain Zerglings.

As of right now, there are two StarCraft games and each game has one expansion. There's no guarantee that thing X in one game works the same as thing X in the same game's expansion, let alone in the other games in the series.