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I have found the title of several of my questions edited, adding the "(Catholic perspective)" clause. Yet, when appropriate, I always add the tag to them. I find the change of the title redundant. It just makes titles longer. Anyone searching for questions can see the tags below the question (e.g. here).

Additionally, not every question has such title, nor have every other from alternative denominations.

Is there an official policy regarding tags in title? As far as I can see, there is not. If this is the case, maybe we could establish one. My proposition would be to decide against this practice. But that's probably content of another post.

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    Adding a denomination in brackets looks like it's tacked on and is ugly in general... far better IMO to properly include the scoping in the question title.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Jul 31 '18 at 13:47
  • @curiousdannii totally agree with that, and I think we're within our purview as people who don't like to look at broken windows to edit those titles. That being said, I think "Catholic Perspective" in and of itself is too vague for lots of questions. Dominicans and Franciscans might have completely different perspectives, but still be Catholic.
    – Peter Turner Mod
    Jul 31 '18 at 14:21
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As mentioned at Is tagging sufficient to scope a question?, there are a few related reasons for tags not being considered sufficient:

  • Tags are easily missed by users who aren't looking for them
  • New users and others who don't understand how this site works tend to view these as answerable "truth questions" and often end up providing "answers" that don't match the tags
  • Questions scoped only with tags tend to collect more "not an answer" posts and off-topic comments
  • The "not an answer" posts and off-topic comments that accumulate must be deleted, per our rules, which often frustrates the authors

In general, failing to clearly specify key components of a question's scope in the question title increases confusion and frustration, particularly among users who are unfamiliar with our site. Incidentally, one of our ongoing challenges is helping newcomers figure out how this site works. To reduce the amount of crucial information that we put in question titles would increase the learning curve and frustrate newcomers even more than is the case now.

That said, it's not always necessary to include every last piece of relevant scope information in a question title (see this related question about putting scope information in the body of a question). But the most important elements need to be there, and usually, when dealing with doctrinal questions that are not clearly tied to a particular denomination, a tradition needs to be specified in the title.

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It is extremely distressing to me as a mod to have to delete good answers on a technicality.

It probably hurts the site in the long run so whatever we can do to make it abundantly clear what kinds of answers are requested we should do.

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