I have been editing many posts in order to correct language mistakes, clarify the post and question, and to make the titles as much descriptive of the actual problem or question as possible. In this post, I will focus on the importance of creating posts with descriptive titles.
The title needs to be descriptive and suggestive of the actual problem or question because it provides the first impression and information to the readers, which may or not decide to read the post depending on the title.
For example, let's consider the following post: Why is my derivation of the back-propagation equations inconsistent with Andrew Ng's slides from Coursera?. The current title of this post is already quite descriptive, after my last edit. However, the original title of this post was "Derivation vs Coding of derivation(numpy) in deep learning", which is quite vague and not suggestive. The current title suggests that the problem is related to the back-propagation algorithm and Andrew Ng's material from Coursera and that there's an inconsistency between different derivations of equations. So, someone reading up the titles of questions, while looking for some interesting posts to answer, can already decide whether they will or not potentially be able to answer the question (or maybe get the information that they need, if they are looking for help). In this case, if you are familiar with the back-propagation algorithm and the math and maybe if you have followed Andrew Ng's course, you will probably be able to answer the question, so you may decide to click on the post.
To conclude, a good post usually has a descriptive (but not necessarily very long) title of the actual problem or question. If you cannot summarise well your problem in the title, then you probably need to understand better your problem before asking a question. Furthermore, if you have multiple questions, then you probably cannot create a post with a descriptive title of those multiple questions and problems, so this is a clear sign that you should create multiple posts, one for each of the questions or problems, as suggested in our on-topic page. So, I encourage our regular users and editors to edit the posts so that they follow this simple guideline.
Any comments?
You should probably also read How do I ask a good question?
