Will we ever clean up those ridiculous spoiler-free “The Force Awakens” question titles?

Question

On one hand^[1], I appreciate the intent behind trying to de-spoiler TFA questions.

However, we don't have THIS deep and wide a level of hiding data for any of the older works, like the other 3 Star Wars films (Episodes 4-6) or Harry Potter.

Does it mean that at some point we will have an officially sanctioned effort to edit such questions (organized or not), so that they actually have a meaningful title? Doing so would benefit all future site users (as opposed to a very narrow - time wise - demographic who haven't seen TFA yet)?

Or will these titles languish forever with absolutely meaningless titles like:

"Why did this character do that vague thingy?"`

...on every single of hundreds of TFA questions?

If the answer is "Yes, we will sanction a cleanup", how will we know when that time comes? Some pre-determined time that elapses after the movie's release? A new Meta question with conclusive voting? Moderators making a decision and announcement? Users fed up with the useless titles organizing an independent tag clean-up, and starting the insurgent work at a volume which makes it clear there is a critical mass of intent?

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_{[1] - Tangentially, personally, I think this level of de-spoilering is beyond ridiculous. If I don't want to have a work spoiled, I either technologically filter it out (like, SE's tag ignore feature), or simply mentally ignore anything pertaining to it. I don't demand that people butcher their GoT, or WoT, or DW questions on account of me not having bothered to consume that universe yet - it's my problem, not theirs </rant>. But that's not really germane to what I'm asking.}

Answer 1

We've been having this discussion (unfortunately, mostly in chat) since the movie came out, and I think the regulars (and a few CMs) are in agreement with you that the spoiler markup and generic titles are out of hand. You'll know pretty well by now that this isn't uncommon when a new movie comes out, we get a flood of badly-despoiled questions, and after a while they have to get fixed.

I (only half jokingly) claimed that we would go back and clean them up as a Christmas Present for Shog9, who was particularly annoyed by them. Now that it's been two weekends since the movie came out, at least IMO we can start working on these.

In the past, from what I've seen, it's been a mostly organic process: when Ant-Man came out, I think it was Gilles who just came along one day and started fixing them all, and other people sort-of fell in behind him. I don't know that it needs coordination -- though obviously if we wanted to put it to a vote and put a drop-dead date on it, I'd fall in line with that effort.

But really, I think if you see a terrible title, go ahead and fix is; we can make those edits now, as long as we try to stick to the general spoiler principles, as we would any other work:

• Try to keep the titles as spoiler free as you can without making them meaningless, so people can choose not to read them.
• Make sure everything is tagged properly, so people can choose to hide/ignore them
• Try to keep the really big reveals/twists/swerves/surprises behind spoiler markup, if possible, without making the answer terrible.
• Overall make the question and answers make sense first, and avoid spoiling second.

Answer 2

Warning: if you haven't seen The Force Awakens, don't read any of the spoilers in this post!

Technological solutions (read: hiding certain tags) have a limited usefulness. For one thing, they depend on other people using those tags.¹ The other, bigger problem is that tag filtering doesn't work at all in many places, like the review queues, individual user profiles, and the "hot network questions" sidebar.

_{¹ Of course, if you can't count on someone to add the correct tags to a question, you certainly can't count on them to write spoiler-free titles...}

This means that, for the foreseeable future, question titles need to remain as spoiler-free as possible. Here, I'm thinking about the big plot points, the ones that Abrams and Disney have gone out of their way to keep hidden: the parentage of certain characters, and which characters are killed and by whom. Quite simply, I never ever, not even 30 years from now, want to see a question titled

Why did Kylo Ren think it important to kill Han (his dad) but not Leia (his mom)?

[Warning: the above is an enormous spoiler for The Force Awakens.]

You might think it sufficient to de-spoilerize the above hypothetical question as

Why did Kylo Ren think it important to kill his dad, but not his mom?

But then what happens when the person who read your title is sitting watching the movie and the initial reveal is made about that spoiler?

They know (from your question title) that Kylo kills his dad, and now they know (from Snoke IIRC) that his dad is Han, so all of a sudden, the whole movie is ruined for them: they'll be sitting there, waiting for the scene where Kylo kills Han, unable to appreciate any of the rest of the movie because they know what's coming, just not when or how.

(I had something like this happen to me once, not with a movie, but same idea: a supposedly spoiler-free review of a book mentioned, in very vague terms, that a sad thing happens, so I spent the whole book dreading who would be killed off and when, and it turns out the sad event was mentioned only in a postscript-like scene on literally the second-to-last page of the book.)

The bottom line is, there are certain things that happen in certain books and movies where knowing about them in even the vaguest terms ahead of time can ruin your enjoyment of the book/movie. In such cases, I think overly-vague question titles are definitely the lesser of two evils.

What's with the Oedipal complex of this TFA character?

I'm sure this can be taken to extremes, with people hiding even the most obscure details behind question titles that are utterly meaningless ("Why did the [spoiler] [spoiler] to [spoiler]?"). If you want to edit the worst of those titles, go ahead, but keep in mind that your irrelevant detail might be someone else's delicious tidbit that they wish they hadn't have known beforehand.