Is it OK for titles to have tags in them?

Question

Inspired by a suggested edit to this post...

The suggested edit was to remove the name of the work (Tron: Legacy, in this case) from the question title - because it was already tagged with the name of the work.

It would cut the title from "Tron: Legacy Soundtrack Missing Part" to "Soundtrack Missing Part"

Browsing through questions, there seems to be no existing standard regarding this; some questions have tags/names in their titles, others don't. Personally, I prefer the name of the work to be in the title. I always read the titles first and then the tags since the tags are intended more for categorization and search (in my opinion, at least). In this particular case, the title without the name feels incomplete.

Answer 1

I see nothing wrong with question titles including the text of the primary tag, as long as it occurs naturally. Modifying an example from the top of the newest questions page (for a game-of-thrones question), I'd be OK with something like this:

What is the difference between a warg and a skinchanger in Game of Thrones?

but would edit the following:

Game of Thrones: What is the difference between a warg and a skinchanger?

Obviously, the actual question doesn't include "Game of Thrones" in the title at all because it's already covered by tagging (and that should be the preferred place for specifying which work(s) the question applies to).

Answer 2

I see absolutely no implicit problem with having one or more tags in the title, if it helps the title make sense, or makes it easier to search on. In fact, it happens quite frequently (particularly in Story ID questions, since the title will often be something like "Help me identify this TV show or movie", and will also likely be tagged tv and/or movies).

On parenting, we went through a major title clean up campaign a while ago. As part of our agreed-upon methodology, we substituted all age-references with the appropriate age-related tag ("toddler", "infant", "pre-schooler", etc.).

While I don't think this applies directly to Scifi.se, I believe it does illustrate that at least in some instances, tags in the title can be beneficial.

That being said, I don't believe that tags should be "mandatory" in titles, or even encouraged unless it really helps to clarify the intent (for instance, a question about Star Trek that is only interested in answers relating to TOS would probably benefit from stating that clearly in the title).

In this particular case, I think the original title is superior to the suggested edit (although I think "What is this missing part to the Tron: Legacy soundtrack?" would have been clearer than either, and may have helped with some of the confusion we can see on the question).