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Comments on Should we show tags before the body, to provide context for reading the question?
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Should we show tags before the body, to provide context for reading the question?
Today I saw the following question on Software Dev (this is the beginning):
(rest of post...)
The title, "connect with SLOT/SIGNAL:QPushButton clicked signal not received by main window" sounds like it could be about one of several languages. From the web context I was guessing Javascript. As I read further I eventually saw MainWindow.cpp, which told me it's actually C++.
Down at the bottom I saw the tags:
On the one hand, you could argue that if I don't know enough to recognize the library (and thus know its language) then I shouldn't be answering the question. And that's true! I had no intention of answering the question. I read the question and its answers to learn something, and wondered if I should have better context for what I would be learning.
Would it make more sense to display the tags under the title, something like this?
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I think that questions should be able to stand on their own without the use of tags, and so tags should be unnecessary to display at all. Not to say they have no use - it's helpful if you want to know some information about a question at a glance, such as when looking at the feed - but if you need to read the tags to understand the question content itself (in your example it sounds like they didn't specify the library in their post), then something is wrong with the question; that information should be edited in. (Of course, even then, you might not understand it, but that's just a lack of knowledge.)
I don't see much point in moving the tags to the top, but that's just because I don't think it should matter either way.
On a slight tangent, but I thought I'd address this:
On the one hand, you could argue that if I don't know enough to recognize the library (and thus know its language) then I shouldn't be answering the question. And that's true! I had no intention of answering the question. I read the question and its answers to learn something, and wondered if I should have better context for what I would be learning.
Randomly poking into a question without having any background knowledge is gonna be confusing, no matter where the tags are placed. If you can't tell what language the question is, then you probably won't learn much from the question or the answer. Sure, you might now know how to fix a click signal not being received by the main window using the QT library, but you still don't know what any of that means.
Basically, if you didn't understand the question without tags, then you aren't going to understand the question much better with them. That's just going to be how it is.
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