Discouraging uninformative question titles. The reason we should, and how can we?

Question

I find one of the useful features of Stack Exchange to be the 'RELATED' list.

However this is made a nonsense when users post questions like:

Please can you answer this question?

or

What does this mean?

These crop up all too regularly - especially in English Language. I'm not aware of a specific way to deal with such titles. Is there one? If not, can there please be one?

Note

I am aware of the existing question How important is it to be specific in question titles?; however this is posed from the point of view of the questioner.

My query is different - I'm looking for suggestions about what can be done about others who produce uninformative titles.

Answer 1

My query is different - I'm looking for suggestions about what can be done about others who produce uninformative titles.

Edit them. Give the question a decent title, one that lets people guess what the question is by looking at the title, and is searchable.

And comment. Let the user know that having a title is important. Feel free to link them to How important is it to be specific in question titles?.

Answer 2

To some extent, uninformative titles can be detected automatically but this requires a site-specific approach. On Mathematics, some community members were sufficiently tired of uninformative titles to

1. Collect the signs of weak titles
2. Write a meta post on writing good titles
3. Propose a feature request for automatic check
4. ... and it was implemented.

Not to say that the problem disappeared — terrible questions still have terrible titles — but the users writing decent questions got some just-in-time help.