|Problems? Is your data what you think it is?|
Re^3: Don'tRetitle This Node (no trial balloons)by tye (Sage)
|on Dec 17, 2004 at 18:45 UTC||Need Help??|
The, "who cares if this consideration sucked, that is why we vote" idea also sucks. It tries to shift the responsibility to where it can never be shifted. Great care needs to be taken before submitting a request for consideration. You can't rely on the voters taking great care to catch your mistakes.
So criticism of a consideration attempt is valid.
Consideration should be done because someone feels strongly that something specific should be done. Consideration to float an idea that the person making the requestion is unsure about is hoping that the majority of voters will do the work to figure out what really should be done and make this apparent based on voting.
You might feel like you are "helping out" by considering a node that needs something done, but a wishy-washy, not very well thought out consideration is not helping. Save your energy for a consideration that you have better insight on and let someone else who is more inspired in this particular case take it.
In this particular case, one must not fall victim to the temptation to make the question title match the answer to the question. That is the wrong approach for several reasons. When someone is trying to solve a problem, they are unlikely to be searching for something that makes sense based on the answer. Your guess at the answer is often wrong. When suggesting a new title, stick to what the question actually says and try to avoid doing much interpretting of the question and certainly avoid trying to guess what the answer will be.
The consideration made some mistakes, but so did sauoq. The question was about "HTML comments", as can be seen if you look at the XML form of the question. But "guestbook" should have been left in the new title.
Let's err on the side of "leave it alone" or at least changing it less rather than more.