Should we be making the titles of questions clearer?

Question

I've noticed there are quite a few questions that the question title is a statement or just a few words rather than an actual question. Recent examples are

Buddhism and Darwin

Specific sutta in the Tipitaka

Equanimity, aversion and anatta

To my mind the title of a question should indicate what the content of the question is. Often I'm seeing great questions hiding under a vague title and I suspect search engines and people generally just won't ever find the content.

For instance with this question I've just changed the title from

Theravada Buddhism and Animal Liberation

to

Does Theravada Buddhism encourages animal liberation?

People can always roll back changes they don't like. Does that sound reasonable? I'm happy not to do it if it's treading on toes

Thanks

Answer 1

The title is the HTML heading (<h1>).

Maybe the contents of the heading is significant for search engine optimization, i.e. a well-written and on-topic heading will help search engines to index the site, and help search engine users to find the topics they may be looking for.

I think it's more important that the title contain relevant key/search words (e.g. "meat" or "vegetarian", to take yuttadhammo's example) than anything else, more important for example than phrasing it as a question with a question mark ... though phrasing it as a question usually also helps, to clarify what the actual question is.

In the example that you have in the OP, changing "Theravada Buddhism and Animal Liberation" to "Does Theravada Buddhism encourages animal liberation?": because it contains the same nouns I don't (although I might be wrong) expect that change will do much if anything to help search engines.

The one good thing about that change is that it introduced a specific verb ("encourages"). Sentences are often clarified by a verb.

Answer 2

Yes, absolutely... I'm not sure they need to actually be formed as questions, but a title should be specific enough to indicate what is being asked. A recent one, "Theravada Monks and daily meals", for example, was actually about whether monks can eat meat. That should definitely be somewhere in the title.