A plea to those who answer "just do it for me" questions: please edit question titles to be usefully descriptive as well

Question

Dear people who like to answer "just do it for me question" (especially of the TikZ sort, but possibly others.) Many such questions have titles that are fundamentally useless for searching purposes. I won't link to specific questions, but generally they look like these:

• How can I draw this graphic?
• How can I draw this in TikZ
• Help drawing diagram

You can use the following linguistic heuristic to decide if a question title definitely needs editing:

• If the title contains the word "this", it (the title, not the question) is useless to others.

Of course this doesn't cover all the cases (like the third example above) but it is pretty exceptionless with respect to identifying a whole class of useless titles.

If you want to answer such questions, that is certainly your prerogative, but could you also edit the titles of the questions you answer to make them more descriptive and useful to others?

I intended this question title to be just A plea to those who answer "just do it for me" questions but then I thought it might be too ironic. :)

Some clarifications

Perhaps because of my somewhat click-baity title, some of the points I'm making seem to have been lost, simply because I mentioned "just do it for me" questions. To be clear, here is what I'm NOT saying:

1. I'm not making any claims whatsoever about the value or lack thereof of "just do it for me questions" however you want to define them.

2. I'm not claiming that a question with a useless title is a useless question. It's simply a question with a useless title.

3. I'm not claiming that only "just do it for me" questions can have such useless titles, so my plea applies to anyone who answers a question containing the word "this" and other variants of the same sort. Although I suggest that the "just do it for me" type (as generally understood by the various meta posts about them) are particularly vulnerable to such non-contentful titles.

4. I'm not trying to make policy. This is exactly why I chose the word "plea". If you've been around the site especially on meta for any length of time, you will know that I'm generally opposed to legislating behaviour, and I'm NOT trying to do that here.

Could I have phrased the question in a less click-baity way? Yes, probably. In fact I could have used a title like "Avoiding deictic pronouns in question titles", but that probably wouldn't have attracted the same readership.

Answer 1

There seems to be some who are not willing to change the meaning of the original question (or title), because they feel they may impede on the requirements originally posted, even if it's obvious that its useless, like "How do I draw this?"

I am in favour of changing the title purely because many of us answering have been here longer than those who post the question(s). And, the system allows for it through editing. If the change seems do deviate too far from the original I am confident the OP will suggest something to the contrary. At the very least post a comment suggesting that they change the title into something more meaningful, more representative, more... betterer (because that's a word). This provides a means for the OP to give some feedback.

A second option in such instances is to cast a downvote since the question most likely "doesn't show any research effort" as it is close to a "just do this for me" request. You feel this is not the case? Well surely you can't upvote as that would go against what the the voting button suggests: "it is useful"? Don't just leave it sitting there, titled useless begging for a one-time answer so that can fade away with time...

Finally, if all else fails and there's really nothing that can be suggested to change the title (or request within the post) into something meaningful, I'd suggest to cast a vote to close the question since it "requires more detail/focus"; this will not harm the site, since it can be re-opened and it will send a message to the OP that their post needs more detail/focus.

The last two options can (and should) be done without feel emotional about it. This is a site meant to store ideas and solutions not just for the OP, but for the larger community. It's not easy asking a question, but it shouldn't be difficult to describe a question better than "How do I draw this?", surely!

Answer 2

Editing titles of posts by others does not always get taken well, especially since one may simply misinterpret the question.

It is also not clear if this is most useful use of time, even if one was able to guarantee that the interpretation is correct. IMHO it would be much more useful to:

1. Use the key words that reflect your interpretation in the answer. Given that, at least according to my experience, the search mechanisms on this site cannot really compete with Google at this point, this makes the post as searchable as it is after changing the title, but avoids the above-mentioned misinterpretation issue. (I personally find a visual search in most cases the most efficient tool.)
2. Add tags to the post if you are absolutely convinced that your interpretation applies.
3. Link to earlier related posts. For instance, if you recycle, say, the suspend join key, link to the original post which proposed it. Apart from being fair to the author of the earlier post, this has the advantage that now these related posts are linked by the mechanisms of the site. That is, no external help by Google is required to identify them.¹

Overall I think that before asking users to edit posts by others one might want to remind them that everyone is responsible for their own post. That is, the priority should be making your own post clear, not misleading, and properly linked to earlier posts rather than changing the title of a post the interpretation of which you may not perfectly capture. Note also that many users answering questions are not native speakers. Asking them to edit a text in a language in which they may make grammatical errors more easily than in their mother tongue is also a bit delicate.

So the bottom-line is that if it is important to you to have "usefully descriptive" titles, you can edit the titles, and hope that you do not get strong reactions. If you know what the ideal title should look like, even better. It is not clear to me why the ones who answer questions should be asked to do that, though. It is also not clear what a "usefully descriptive" title is,² personally I do not think that the title of this very thread is "usefully descriptive", which is a bit ironic. However, one should keep in mind that users add forest trees and tikz pictures and so on to their document precisely because it is hard to represent the information just using words. It seems to me ironic, too, that in this thread those questions are targeted. If you need a complex diagram to explain something it isn't that easy to describe it in a title. Sure, if it contains a tree, say, we could add tree to the title, but this is what tags are for, isn't it?

Your plea is extremely well packaged, i.e. the wording is great. However, content-wise it suggests that others, i.e. not you, should edit the titles of posts of yet other users over their heads. I am not as good at packaging messages as you, but if the aim is to go for better titles then maybe the content of the plea could be that all users, not just a subset, should suggest alternative titles to authors of questions with "this" in the title. At least I don't consider myself a superior user who can edit titles of posts by others without their consent.

_{1 As discussed in the comments, one cannot link every post that does something somewhat similar, and this statement was never meant like that. For instance, one version of the suspend join key can be found here. I never found out who originally proposed it but think it would be fair to give the real creator credit if I use it, and also link to the post so that, if there are problems, users have immediate links to solutions that are already on the market. Similarly for several other tricks of that sort.}

_{2 IMHO it is just a catchy expression without too much content. This is not the place to have another iteration of the discussion whether or not it is necessary to explain the expressions one is using. Of course, I do think that one has to explain what is meant by such phrases, but we can agree that we disagree.}