What are the criteria for a high quality question title?

Question

While using the collection of SE sites that I participate in, I've discovered various reasons about why the title of a question is, IMO, extremely important. Just consider the very first feature you see at work when you type the title when posting a new question (ie the Questions that may already have your answer that show up, dynamically, while you type).

So as per the title of this question (oeps!): What are the criteria for a high quality question title? If you were to write something like guidelines about the perfect question title, what would those guideine be?

If you wonder why I ask (or don't think it really matters), how about these pseudo-random picks (in a random order):

1. Loadbalancing nexus artifact repository
2. What is a 'Feature Flag Toggle' and when to use them (or not)?
3. Ansible Dynamic Inventory - generate inventory with ip addresses under specific tag with underscore instead of dot
4. Problem in integrating Travis-CI with core PHP projects
5. What's the difference between checkin and checkout?
6. Simple CI/CD Containers in AWS
7. How do I run ansible on one host at a time and break on a failure

PS 1: This may be a question that may be a better fit for meta.SE. Anybody wiling to do so: go ahead and migrate it to over there ...

PS 2: did my question content (more or less) match your expection before you actually opened/read it? If not: what else did you expect this question to be about?

Answer 1

My advice for a good title is to summarize as precisely as possible what the question is about the way you may ask it to a colleague.

So you may wish to be precise and avoid too long titles or to mimic a book title, main goal behind this, is that search engines are more likely to present your question as search result if it match what you would have asked.

From your list of examples (which I didn't open to stay on the tittle only as far as I can):

• Links 1 and 7 sounds ok to me.

• The 2 has the problem of being a question and its follow up question, I'd argue it worth two question so answers stay focused on one thing and get more details.
  The tittle is descriptive enough.

• 3 start with its tags and is super long, I'd write it as "How can I generate inventory by a tag with underscores in Ansible Dynamic Inventory" and extend the details in the question itself. That would be more straight to the point with still the important information.

• 4 give no idea of what the problem is, sounds begging for a tutorial about travis and PHP (and was more or less the case if I remember it well)

• 5 It miss a subject to narrow it, are we talking about code, organization time management, issue time metric ?

• 6 Says what technology it is about, but it's not obvious if it's about a configuration problem, a technical problem, a process problem or a call to advices/How to.

As is, only with he title there's only one I have an idea how to reword, for the others, I'd have to open the question and deduct/guess what the author has in mind.

For reference, Jon Skeet's blog entry about how to write a good question has valuable informations.