25

I commented on a question (here) that the title is more general than the duplicate (here) that it was marked as.

The second question, while correctly referenced, is far too specific for the actual issue. If I were to edit the title to something more like "Updating a device to iOS 11.2 breaks support with Xcode 9.1", is this acceptable?

Maybe this second question would never have been asked because a better title could have been found. What is the proper thing to do here?

EDIT:

Based on the feedback I did update the title, added block quotes in the body, and a bit of verbiage to help others. I also explained to the OP why I did this.

| | | | | |
  • 5
    If you feel that the dupe would be a good canonical candidate then it needs to be edited so it fits that canonical purpose. If you have a better title by all means provide it, given you don't loose value that was provided by the OP. I can't judge the specific example though. That needs an subject matter expert. – rene Dec 3 '17 at 18:31
  • Yes, your proposed title is much better in my opinion. The error message (that is currently used as the title) is already included in the question so in case someone has the same problem and just copies & pastes the message into google, they'll still be able to find this question. It would be nice if you could also add some blockquote formatting to the error message inside the question body while you're editing the title. – Keiwan Dec 3 '17 at 21:11
  • I tend to prefer including error messages in a title, as it will return as top result like that when you search for it. – Cœur Dec 6 '17 at 12:34
  • 1
    @Cœur I don't agree. I have yet to copy the important piece of an error message into Google or DuckDuckGo and not get returns from SO where the error message is only in the question. I see (and respect) your opinion, but my search experience doesn't agree with it. – dfd Dec 6 '17 at 12:48
  • @dfd, check at my profile, I'm in China: no Google, no DuckDuckGo. My best available search tool is StackOverflow internal search. (OK, not true, I have qwant.com and ecosia.org still working) – Cœur Dec 6 '17 at 12:54
  • @Cœur, good point. I rarely use SO search because of how good those external search engines are. I still feel that titles should reflect the actual underlying issue, but see your point. (Note, I didn't just edit the title. I asked on meta and due to the reception only then changed it.) I hope - for you - that the internal SO search is as good with question content as the external search engines are. – dfd Dec 6 '17 at 13:06
29

Maybe this second question would never have been asked because a better title could have been found.

Exactly. One of our biggest challenges, not just with askers finding existing questions, but also us finding appropriate duplicate targets, is even finding them in the first place, for reasons such as this.

Don't be afraid to edit duplicate targets if you feel that you can help searchers find them more easily and thus reduce the number of duplicates getting asked in the future.

| | | | | |

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/360159/is-it-okay-to-edit-a-title-of-a-question-referenced-as-duplicate
meta.stackoverflow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-24
122001
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LEO2D5NNNQ3GYJ45PVZX2I4SQIC6SKHO
<urn:uuid:031ec115-fd07-4298-bf16-7f9fb48af30e>
2020-05-25T06:03:44Z
151.101.129.69
text/html
sha1:WRCBNAHTO3YII2XSEC6JRPBODQ5YJAX5
<urn:uuid:fed6c4c1-4401-4523-b548-b75642e4ef09>
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/360159/is-it-okay-to-edit-a-title-of-a-question-referenced-as-duplicate
response
<urn:uuid:cd3e6460-4c14-4b7d-9c00-c319c646654c>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-24
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-62.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/