Users writing tags in title

Question

We know it's good practice to not write tags in title because Stack's tag system is good and we should trust it.

Nonetheless, there are many questions using them. Here are some of the title variations i found

[Tag]:

[Tag],

[Tag]-

In [Tag],

At first I've decided to edit using the following justification

Remove tag from title, see more here how to write good titles https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10648/364217

but then realized this is one of those things better to ask here.

How shall we proceed?

Answer 1

The link you provided is great!

The first phrase to come to my mind to answer this:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

So, instead of doing a massive amount of edits that adds low / no value and having them stockpiling on the edition queue, you could add comments on these questions to teach people on how to proper ask a question.

Alternatively, once you get 1k rep, you get the edit priviledge and you can improve questions as much as possible. Notice, however:

Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you observe.

All in all, the idea is ok-ish, but I would refrain from massively update questions only because of it.

• Best case scenario you're creating a big queue of editions with low value.
• Worst case scenario people may think you're just doing this for rep / badges.

Suggestion - as you go through the questions and answers, suggest edits that could add value. Steadily keep doing this and your rep will increase. Then, once you get the 1k barrier, you could edit these by yourself (again, never massivelly, otherwise you're flooding the Top Question view).

Answer 2

Think About Semantic Clarity of the Question

Context matters, and clarity is often the determining factor for me when I review titles. For example:

• ruby: chars in var name

  This is a terrible title for many reasons, and the tag being in the title is only one of them. Contrast this with the question below.

• What characters are allowed when defining a variable name in Ruby?

  This question is very clear, and makes it easy to determine at a glance whether it's the same question you have, or is one that you can answer. The inclusion of keywords that might or might not also be tags on a given site (e.g. ruby or variable) is actually useful because it allows the question to be meaningful in other contexts, such as when referenced in a link or "see also" section. It also helps to differentiate this particular question from other similar questions in other languages without having to cross-check against the list of tags attached to it.

Think about it like this: if you see the question all by itself in the Linked or Hot Network Questions sections of a page elsewhere on SE, would you know what the question was about? If the answer is no, then tagging is the least of the problems with the question.

Bad question titles should probably be cleaned up, but titles that contain keywords are not inherently bad. It's all about whether the question is clear and useful; while avoiding tags in questions is a good rule of thumb, it's a guideline rather than a law of nature.