I've found a particular set of "question"s with bad titles; how should I proceed?

Question

I saw a question on the front page of Stack Overflow that had a title that intrigued me.
If you search for a keyword: question you will find a set of what I would consider poorly titled. You see, questions with "question" in the title will hardly ever contain a question in the title at all.

So we have 3720 poorly, similarly, titled questions. Who has an idea on how to fix them?

Update: If you search title:question you get over 5000+

Answer 1

Indeed, there are a lot of badly-titled questions in there. Time for a posse!

Pick a badly titled question. Edit the title. There are conflicting opinions as to what constitutes a good title; browse these meta questions. Be sure to edit the body and tags as well, if you can improve them. And if you find a question where the title is useless and the body doesn't make sense either, especially if it's lingering unanswered, vote (or flag) to close. Oh, and don't forget to vote if you happen on a question that deserves it (one way or another).

It would be better to concentrate on the worst problems first. There are two priorities:

• Fixing the most important questions.
• Fixing the worst titles.

The most important questions are to a first approximation the questions with the most views. Highly scored questions matter too: there are perhaps gems that have escaped notice due to a poor title. Try starting with the Greatest Hits list at

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits

(obviously, edit the URL to reflect the site you are most interested in.)

I've put up a SEDE query to list questions with suspiciously bad titles. I use a badness heuristic based on views, score (of both questions and answers), and title length (“Interview question” is worse than “Boost shared_ptr container question”). You may want to tweak this query to try different heuristics.

Answer 2

Based on this data, we are flat-out disallowing the words:

• question (but not "question mark")
• doubt (the odd Indian synonym for question)
• problem

... from all future question titles on SO, SU, SF.

help was also blacklisted, but as of 2011-10-11 has been forbidden in most cases but not quite all. In particular, help may not appear as the first or last word of a title.

See for yourself the carnage these words have wrought. All questions with this specific word in the title on...

• Stack Overflow: question (5k+), doubt (365), help (5k+), problem (5k+)
• Super User: question (298), doubt (5), help (494), problem (1,506)
• Server Fault: question (513), doubt (5), help (713), problem (1,629)

Answer 3

Fixing up titles came up in this podcast (10th and 11th bullet).

It turns out that while people treat titles like email subject lines, titles are in fact very important since they help search engines and also help people when scanning search restults.

One example that came from the podcast was this question.

Removing lubricant from the rear brake and rim?

Originally the title was "Lubricant on bike brake".

See this question for a discussion with specific guidence on how to make the titles better.

Answer 4

I just did go through my "small tags", and cleaned most of them. (See below for details - I'm using this to keep track of my progress.)

Some recommendations, if you want to do this, too:

• First pick the tags where you are knowledgeable (or where you want to learn more).
• Often these questions have other things to correct, too. Do this, if you are already editing.
• Some questions are just bad, or off topic. There vote to close instead.
• Also have a look at the answers - are they good, or are comments/downvotes needed? Maybe you should even add another answer (if you happen to know one, and the existing ones are not correct).

---

Questions with question in the title:

Finished:

• jsch, jzlib didn't have any such questions.
• javadoc, javac are now cleaned (the latter with a bit of help).
• cryptography is cleaned (apart from two questions which I voted for close).
• encryption is cleaned, with one genuine "question" question, two where I voted to close, and one already closed one.
• Crypto StackExchange had no such questions (and I'll make sure that this stays so).
• db4o (2 such questions are now cleaned).
• applet (6 questions), cleaned now - one legitimate, three voted to close.
• latex (16 questions), cleaned now - two legitimate, two voted to close, one already closed
• everything on TeX Stack Exchange (26 questions) - cleaned now - 7 legitimate ones (most about "question mark"), two closed.
• git (57 questions) cleaned now - one closed left, one voted to close.
• bash (58 questions) cleaned now - two closed ones left, three voted to close. (If you read this, please consider voting to close, too.)

The following ones I started, but certainly not finish alone:

• multithreading (232 questions) (now 229)
• java (1,569 questions) (now 1,513 non-closed ones). I'm now mainly trying to keep pace with new questions here (either retitling or closing them).

---

Similar signal words are help and problem ... and the plurals questions and problems (even helps). I started to clean up some of them, too, mostly the newest ones.

• tag name - help - problem - questions - problems
• jzlib: - none at all.
• jsch: - none at all.
• javadoc: - help: 1 => 1 (leg.) - problem: 9 - questions: 0 - problems: 1 (=> 0)
• javac: - help: 2 => 1 - problem: 12 - questions: 1 - problems: 4
• cryptography: - help: 14 => 4 - problem: 14 - questions: 4 - problems: 2
• encryption: - help: 31 => 11 - problem: 55 - questions: 10 - problems: 10
• db4o: - help: 0 - problem: 5 - questions: 1 - problems: 1
• applet: - help: 18 => 4 - problem: 63 - questions: 4 - problems: 9
• latex: - help: 10 => 2 (leg) + 3 (t.c.) - problem: 48 - questions: 3 - problems: 8
• git: - help: 58 (=> 27) - problem: 112 - questions: 17 - problems: 38
• bash: - help: 90 (=> 78) - problem: 126 - questions: 4 - problems: 17

Where I put an => arrow, I've already cleaned all the questions. The remaining ones are either legitimate or should be closed anyways. Arrows in parentheses are work-in-progress. (The links now show only the non-closed questions, and ordered by activity.)

Answer 5

There are also several very poor question titles with 'information' in them. Here is an updated query:

Here for this:

DECLARE @tag nvarchar(25) = ##tag:string##
-- FIXME: uncomment this line on SE 2.0 sites, and also use the line with
--        Replace(q.tags, …) below instead of the straight AND q.tags line
--SET @tag = Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(@tag, '-', 'ö'), '+', 'ç'), '#', 'ñ'), '.', 'û')

SELECT
  q.Id As [Post Link],
  q.Score As [Score],
  q.AnswerCount As [Answers],
  q.ViewCount As [Views],
  (q.ViewCount / 2 + q.Score
   + (SELECT Sum(a.Score) FROM Posts a WHERE a.ParentId = q.Id)
   - (Len(q.Title) - 8) * Len(q.Title)) As [Badness]
FROM Posts q
WHERE q.PostTypeId = 1
  AND q.Title LIKE '%information%'
--  AND Replace(Replace(q.Tags, 'à', '>'), 'é', '<') LIKE '%<' + @tag + '>%'
  AND q.Tags LIKE '%<' + @tag + '>%'
  AND q.ClosedDate IS NULL
ORDER BY Badness DESC

This is probably my favorite of the lot, though it's from 2008: DLL Information (Badness of 532)

Answer 6

No "magic wand" exists for users to globally search/replace or update titles. Perhaps at the programming level, using a stream editor or an SQL update statement might help, but the most economical and efficient solution I can think of is to notify each OP to edit their titles and review the content of their questions while they're at it.

If a screening process is implemented, where submitted questions are reviewed, approved or rejected, prior to being posted on the sites, then this and many other problems would become academic.

Answer 7

If you ran a script to pull the first sentence ended with a question mark and made it the title, I bet you would get markedly better titles than what is already there.