Really depends on your environment, the kind of criticism you are comfortable getting and the expectations you set for your users. To give context to my answer, I run an internal Discourse instance for a software company where I’m the only native english speaker(out of tens of thousands of staff).
I used to reach out to the user and teach them how to write a title. After a year of this I realised I was wasting my time and theirs. Now I re-title about 30% of topics. They tend to fall into two types:
1. The “one worder” - I just go straight into this and change it
2. The “not specific enough”
My aciton depends on the following question: “Are the right people already particpating?”
- No: Edit title
- Yes: Set a reminder for 2-3 weeks. The 2-3 week delay is to allow users to resolve the topic with the title they are familiar with. When the topic is effectively resolved, I will change the title to something that is specific to the problem - which is sometimes easier to do after the solution is posted. By this point the OP might be a little irritated, but they don’t interact with the topic anymore anyway, so there’s less attachment/ownership felt on their side.
For me, Q&A requires content refinement to be successful. Yes, people can always ask new questions, but giving a question a bit of a polish a few months after people have stopped discussing it can make the difference between a clear question and answer vs thread with unclear purpose.
This is spot on. I think Titles are fair game, and I only fix typos in the bodies of people I am close to personally.