Vote to close and unclear titles

Question

We usually VTC questions with titles that don't reflect the goal of the code. Examples of said titles:

• "How do I make this better?"
• "My code is not fast enough"
• "I'd like my code to be more pythonic"

I'm all in for these titles to change, because they're obviously not good and go against the kind of titles we want to have.

Though, I'd like to get the feeling of the community regarding this kind of situation.

In this case, the original title was : Speed up auto encoder training without breaking anything (the task accomplished by the code)

Obviously, not good. But, it's very clear in the post that it's about GRU autoencoders (even though I don't know what that is).

So I'm wondering, instead of VTCing the question, going through the whole process of OP editing, the question being nominated for re-opening and all in all losing time, did I make the right choice by simply editing the title to make it clear?

So, my question is the following : In cases where it seems pretty obvious what the title should be, should we simply edit the title instead of voting to close, or should we let the OP edit their own title, at the possible expense of having to go through the whole re-open process?

Answer 1

We usually VTC questions with titles that don't reflect the goal of the code.

I find this entire premise very, very, very sad and completely contrary to the very welcoming spirit that made this site a success.

A bad title is just that: a bad title. It does not take away anything from the post, it does not make a question off-topic in itself. Code isn't more broken because the title makes it unclear what's going on. The post body isn't any more unclear because the OP didn't notice the watermark, or didn't bother complying with its recommendation.

Every single close vote cast over a bad title kills a kitten and a baby unicorn.

Edit the title to fit the guidelines. Any close vote that can be avoided with such a simple edit is a wasted vote that only serves to alienate well-meaning newcomers that don't know everything you know about this site. Yes, the title watermark is there. Yes, people don't read it. Yes, it's annoying.

But no, a bad title does not make a question off-topic.

Fix bad titles, you'll save a lot of energy closing otherwise perfectly fine questions, frustrating OPs, busy-working the review queue to ponder what's wrong with that question with a now-edited-and-perfectly-fine title, wrongly closing them, and then going through the review process all over again for reopening... when all it needed was a simple edit.

Of course, if the purpose of the code can't be inferred from the post body because the information is missing or wildly incomplete, then yes, by all means do cast a vote to close as unclear what you're asking or lacks concrete context (as applicable). But not because of the bad title - because the information present in the post does not suffice to determine what is it that the OP's code does.

did I make the right choice by simply editing the title to make it clear?

Yes, absolutely. This should be the default.