What manner of “title”?

Question

The title tag includes a jumble of questions concerning different concepts of titles, making the tag less than useful.

1. Questions about the name given to part or whole of a creative work, e.g.

   • Is Capitalising Every Word more common in music titles?
   • How to capitalize "get out of" in a title according to CMOS?
   • Appropriate title case: 'em or 'Em or 'EM

2. Questions about honorifics and styles, e.g.

   • First name or last name with "Sir"
   • What does "Ms." stand for?

3. Questions about occupations and professions, e.g.

   • What is the name for a person who raises turkeys?
   • How does a "research scientist" differ from a "scientist"?

4. Questions about labels or names in general, e.g.

   • What name would you give to data about a person's illnesses, ailments, diseases and medical condition?
   • What do you call devices which passed the test successfully?

I perceive a slight preponderance of questions of type #1, and believe that should be the purpose of the tag. I am inclined to retag questions of type #2 as honorifics, type #3 as professions, and type #4 as terminology, single-word-requests, or others as may be appropriate.

Am I correct in that the original intent of title is for essays and not essayists or essaying?

Answer 1

One way of finding what a tag was originally intended for — probably the only way without any tag wiki — is to look at the earliest questions. Very often, a number of questions will have been retagged with the new tag when it was created, and these example questions can only be those in existence at that time. The earliest questions are at the end of the “newest” list.

The earliest title questions are

• Which words in a title should be capitalized? (Question number 14 from August 2010)
• Do you capitalize both parts of a hyphenated word in a title? (August 2010)
• Why Should One Capitalize Titles When Publishing? (November 2010)
• Is "Actor Peter Fonda found dead body inside car" correct? (January 2011)
• How to capitalize first letters in titles? (January 2011, duplicate)
• How do I style book titles in a block of italicized text? (March 2011)

Then things start to go off the rails a bit.

• https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16357/is-the-title-total-superleague-too-much (March 2011, closed)
• What is the meaning of P.S. in a name? (April 2011)
• Is there a Name for this Style of Capitalisation? (April 2011 and correctly tagged)
• When is it appropriate to refer to someone as Dr. [Surname]? (May 2011)

I suspect the tag was created in March 2011, and it was intended for the titles of books and articles. It looks like it was not intended for names or honorifics.

I think new tags should always be accompanied by at least a tag wiki excerpt if not the full page to avoid just this sort of misinterpretation.

Answer 2

You are correct in that "title" is for things like title case and the like. The others should be re-tagged as appropriate. You might want to add a tag wiki to explain the purpose of the tag as well.