Recently, I've noticed very long, non-focused question titles. Should we encourage limiting question titles, and if yes, is there a way to enforce this?
Personally, I am in favour of this as it focuses the attention of the poster to stating the nub of the problem, thereby reducing the time others have to spend on figuring out what the poster's question is really about.
The length of question titles is already limited. Earlier there was a limit of 250 characters, in May 2010 it was changed to a maximum of 150 characters.
You can test it: if you type a long title, you would get a message:
That title is too long to be useful. Can you make it shorter?
150 characters may still be much, but sometimes it's good to have some more space for the best summary of a question for the title. Technical limits should prevent abuse and low quality, while still allowing normal usage.
If long question titles would appear, I trust our community that we would edit them to make the titles shorter and clearer. Similarly for unclear questions which have a "good length". By the way, there's also a minimum requirement of 15 characters in a question title.
I don't like answering my own questions, but here it goes.
The remained is a proposal for improving titles (not just titles that are too long). I decided to use a format where I list a typical title, a reason why I think the title is poor, and a proposal to improve the title. In the list I've tried to use recent titles, hoping this shows relevance.
The proposal is by no means complete. Please add to the list if you have more ideas. Hopefully, this exercise will result in a list of "error patterns" that we can use to improve subject titles. Also the reasons in the list may help to convince the OP they should change their titles.
When adding items to a list, always add them to the end of the list. Otherwise, you may src*w up the numbers.
<X> in red? This title is too specific. If we don't change this title we end up with all possible variations for different colours. A better title would be How do I change the colour of <X>?tikz or pstricks). Here the question isn' specific enough. I propose we add the name of the package to the start of the title: tikz: How do I draw a circle? Even better: tikz: Drawing a circle. (See the next item.) If there are several packages/classes, I propose to list them in alphabetic order, using forward slashes as a separator: pstricks/tikz: Drawing a circle. I also propose to use similar titles for engine-specific questions. For example, pdflatex: creating hyperlinks. An alternative solution would be to rely on the tag and omit the reference to the engine.pdflatex: Hiding all files, except for the .tex and .pdf files. Note that I decided to get rid of the question mark because the title is now the topic of the post.Th ligature after period.I know some may find this list a bit OTT. Personally, I think that a good title is just as important as a MWE because it helps the reader save time.
No doubt the list is incomplete (and indeed redundant). I decided to start writing the list because I needed a break from marking assignments.:-)
As stated before, feel free to add to the list.
PSTricks / TikZ / Metapost at the start of each question title just adds noise.
Change only the color of Table of content, but not cite color of Figures and Tables, etc. by Hyperrefpackage. This is so long you have to read it a few times before you can understand it and it definitely isn't focused. When I suggested the title could be shortened, the OP changed it toHyperref: Changing the linkcolor locally in the TOC, which is short, easy to parse, and much more focused.Making \const{\length{\list}} work while keeping \const works as the original intentbe a much better title? You suggested the title yourself (I made a small change to the text in bold face at the start of your question).longtableis not very descriptive.