Why is it necessary for the question title to have more than 15 characters?

Question

I was editing this post which had several mistakes, post, starting with the question title (it was ambiguous). The most reasonable title which I considered writing was "Will vs Would" since the OP's question was mainly based on that, as they weren't able to understand the difference between these two terms in the sentence structure. But when I edited the title and contents of the body, and hit the edit button, it popped an error message: Title need to be 15 character or longer.

Why is it a necessary for question titles to have 15 character or longer word format when they can simply use shorter terms for describing their question satisfactorily?

I have also seen people asking questions with titles that are literally the whole question put in the title column, and only the sentence present in the body section which is to be acted upon. Is that a good practice while asking questions? (I currently can't find an example for the same, but I assure you I have seen this, many times in fact. Will add the link when I find one.)

On the other hand, I have also seen people writing the question in the title and the same thing again in the body section. I am literally confused which one among them is a good practice? E.g this post has this type of writing format.

Also, I have seen error message prompting that the question title already exists. Why are questions with the same title rules out when they could possibly have different level of needs or answers?

Answer 1

I disagree that the title "Will vs Would" was satisfactory. I don’t think the current title is satisfactory either.

Imagine you’re a learner looking to solve your problem about whether to use will or would.

Here’s the problem:

• "will" or "would"
• Will / would usage
• will and would differences
• Will and would difference
• Compare 'will' with 'would'
• Difference: Will vs Would?
• will vs would usage
• "Will" vs "would"
• "Will" or "Would"?
• "Would" Vs "Will"
• 'Will' vs. 'would'
• Would be ,Will be
• Will be or would be?
• Are "Will" and "Would " interchangeable?
• will vs would usages methods
• will and would usage differences
• modal choice: will or would?
• Would be or will be
• difference between "would" and "will"
• Usage of 'will' and 'would'
• (Will have) or (Would have)
• Use of "will" vs "would"
• Usage of "would" and "will"
• Will vs would usage differences
• Confuse using will and would
• Would have (or) Will have

(In case any of these questions get edited, here’s a picture of the above list.)

Did you find that one canonical answer you were looking for? Or did you get frustrated and stop looking (like me currently)? This is also the reason titles are required to be unique (and actually the algorithm for this is clearly not aggressive enough, because it doesn’t ignore capitalization or punctuation).

There are two possibilities here. Likely both are true:

• We have many duplicate questions and need to start closing them.
• Some questions are not duplicates, and the title should be edited to reflect how each question is different from the others. This will result in a longer and hopefully better title, where a person looking at the question in Google can decide if their question is the same or different without having to spend a lot of time clicking through to each question, reading the body of it too, and also trying to remember if they already read that question or not.

Answer 2

This is a very longstanding practice; a July 2009 post mentions the "recent" increase from 10 to 15 characters on StackOverflow. The question title has a minimum required length for the same reason the post itself has a minimum required length and must have at least one tag applied: for crude quality control.

A low-effort title is correlated with a low-effort question, and the underlying intent is to discourage titles that give no indication as to what the question is about. You often encounter these on forums with weak moderation, for example: threads titled "help plz" or "need fix URGENT" or "wondering if..." or "hi i am user12345," and so on. Without any idea of what lies behind, who wants to waste time even opening them in the first place, much less improving them or answering them?

If the question body and title are the same, it may indicate that the question needs improvement. Titles have a maximum length of 150 characters, which seems thin considering that one of the basic expectations throughout Stack Exchange is that questions should be specific and practical and demonstrate some prior effort at research.