Should "Title Says It All" questions be edited or closed?

Question

I see many questions with really long titles and bodies with nothing more than:

"Title says it all"
"See title. ~thanks~"
"In PHP. thanks!"

Examples (a couple I already edited):

• How can I know the body content is outputted (then cannot use the header function)?
• If there is a button in a link, when I click this button, how to avoid the link?
• ASP.NET: Could anyone provide some C# paging codes in Repeater or ListView controls for me to learn

I assume the "thanks" variants at the end are to get around a minimum length. Should these be edited or voted to close? If edited, how? Should I just repeat the title in the body?

It seems like a question that can fit entirely in the title is inherently low quality.

UPDATE: There's over 700 of just the "title says it all" pattern for anyone that wants to have fun editing these: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22Title+says+it+all%22

Answer 1

I have to respectfully disagree with Andrew's response that it is not a question. While I don't necessarily like questions that are completely self-described in the title, there are many questions which really don't need anything beyond the title to explain what's desired in the question.

Here is an example that I think is cut-and-dry (in the interest of transparency, had a "very low quality" flag on it which I declined, with a custom message indicating that it was very difficult for me to decline as it was "cut-and-dry, asked-and-answered" after looking at it for a long while):

Excel: Assign a macro to a hyperlink?

In the above, there is a clear answer that is accepted.

Looking at the descriptive text of the close as "not a real question" reason, it states:

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. See the FAQ.

In the question above, it is none of those things.

While pithy is antithetical to Stack Exchange, there's currently not a close reason for it.

Yes, lack of content is usually a red flag indicating that a question may be very low quality, but it's not an immediate condemnation of whether or not it is low quality.

Note that Jeff has commented that the criteria for VLQ is that the post is not salvageable. In the case above, there's nothing to salvage. It's just... brief.

So the overall recommendation is, it depends. Some recommendations:

• Try to edit the post to provide better content (thank you to GraceNote for pointing that out). An example would be the edit I performed on this question. It doesn't put words in the OPs mouth, it doesn't detract from the answers provided, and indicates something to help expand the question in general.

• If it has an accepted answer, it likely means that someone interpreted it correctly in the eyes of the user, and it really needs a little love to give it some more content (unless it has other glaring issues which it should be closed for).

• If there are multiple answers with upvotes, it's an indication that multiple people understood the question as asked (brief as it is) well enough to provide answers, and that others on top of that indicated that they understood the question and answers enough to provide an upvote on it.

• If the question is upvoted, it's possible that people understand the question, but as we all know, voting is not anywhere near a reliable indicator of whether or not a question is good (I'd look at this as a last resort and only if you have nothing else to rely on, and even then, take it with a grain of salt). Note this applies to answers as well, but in the point above, it's the presence of multiple upvoted answers (which is different from a single upvoted question) that is the indicator.

• If there's a duplicate of it on the site (and in a lot of cases, there probably are), vote to close it as a duplicate and then flag for moderator attention, indicating it's a duplicate. This is much better for the site overall, since we like multiple representations of asking the same thing (it boosts organic search).

In the event that the question meets none of the above criteria, I'd advise the following (assuming one has the privileges to do so):

• If the question is recent, vote to close and possibly leave a comment on what exactly makes it VLQ. This has the dual effect of a) letting others know why the question is VLQ, as well as let's the poster know that there are problems and they might be able to edit it to provide better content.

• If the question is not recent, then vote to close/delete and flag for moderator attention *with a custom message. Indicate why the question is not clear or deserves to be close in the case that a title might be interpreted as cut-and-dry. This will help moderators tremendously in understanding your point of view on why it's VLQ and help us make the best decision for the site.

Answer 2

My recommendation is that if you run into a question where the body is just "See the title" or similar, revise the question body to rephrase the presented question. Like casperOne, I don't believe that the style alone is enough to warrant closure - if the underlying question is close-worthy, or if the lack of detail is enough to make it unanswerable, that's closeworthy. But if it's a valid question in its brevity, then closing isn't very wise to do.

There are two advantages to rephrasing the question in the body. The first is that this makes it look better - just pointing at the title looks bad. The second is that having a second wording improves the searchability of the question. Remember how many problems we have with duplicates because people just phrased things differently? By using two ways to phrase the same problem (when possible), it creates two avenues of access within a single question. As our goal is to help people to find these questions in addition to having the answers, improving searchability is a great way to handle questions which otherwise are just the title.

To take a specific point out of your question, if the title is unwieldy and long to allow for this, another course of action is to condense the title and bring the complexity into the question body. This isn't always feasible, and often requires talking with the author to set it up properly, but in the end, the meat of the information should be in the question body, not in the title.

Answer 3

I think many of those can be closed as not a real question. You could leave a comment to ask for more information when the asker is still active.

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When I say "many of those", I'm making a wild (though educated) guess as to the ratio of good/bad questions that follow this pattern. My guess is that many of the questions which can possibly fit entirely in the title of a question would qualify as "not a real question" because they won't be detailed enough to be answerable.

That is, that it qualifies that "it's hard to tell what is being asked here", to paraphrase the close reason.

I should have been more careful, though, to state that it is not merely the fact that the question fits entirely in the subject which causes this. It is certainly possible to craft an appropriate question in such a short length. It's just hard to do.

In some of the cases, you could leave a comment to request that the asker flesh out their question with more details. You might do so with or without also issuing a vote to close as I noted above. I don't think the judgment there is any different than any normal question which might apply as "not a real question".

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Another item I realize I could have been more detailed about: If I was not at 3K reputation on the site, I would probably not flag most of these questions as not a real question, as that is demanding that a moderator make an up-or-down decision on the spot. I would instead leave a comment (if the user is still active), and only flag it if it's really, very clear that it is "not a real question" in any way, shape or form.

Being a 3K user on Stack Overflow, though, I would vote to close as NARQ. In fact, I did so on each of the three you posted. I feel the 'vote to close' option is a bit less strong, because it requires 5 votes to close, so others must agree with me.

I think I see that you flagged a number of these questions as NARQ, and perhaps you did so in response to my initial answer. If that's the case, I deserve the down votes I got on this! I deserve them anyway for leaving this answer so simple for so long... bad me! (FYI: I truly don't mind DV's like these, anyway.)

Answer 4

"Title Says It All", while definitely annoying is merely bad posting style. You can't take it at face value and say "questions that can fit in the title should be closed" (although this may frequently be true). These should be edited, if for no other reason, to set a better example to other users, even if they do get closed.

It doesn't take much effort to:

1. Copy the title
2. Put it in the question body
3. Do what you can to make both items more substantial or clearer

If after this, the question is still unfit, then yes - vote to close.