Yes, normally that'd be fine. Usually in submissions I only edit a title for length, but in this case:
1. The paper's actual title says so little about the study or why it's worth paying attention to it that I felt it was completely worthless. Given what they say in the abstract they did, do you think the current title is actually appropriate at all? It doesn't even communicate that they were engineering viruses, let alone the 80% fatality rate outcome which is what matters most here.
2. I still do not agree that the title chosen was "editorialized". It neutrally and accurately reflected the outcome of their study, as stated in their own abstract. A headline is supposed to summarize succinctly what the article is about or says - the current headline just doesn't do that.
For anyone else wondering what this is about, the original title was (I think) this:
"Researchers develop Omicron variant with 80% fatality rate"
which is a correct summary of the research, that doesn't contain slant. The current one is "Role of spike in pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 Omicron", which appears to be selected to communicate as little as possible about the actual research.
I think the rule about not editorializing needs an exception so that someone can point out an important or interesting fact using an article whose original title is too generic.
Another example would be "Press release from XYZ". If it talks about XYZ reaching some major breakthrough, the title should be allowed to reflect that. It's a waste of everyone's time to post the article titled "Press release".
And arguably this situation should fall under such an exception.
HN guidelines strongly encourage that for the sake of removing editorial from the submission, but adding something at least a little descriptive is good to keep people from wasting their time. This got traction because of the domain, not the title.
> Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.
She's not responsible for HN guidelines or our interpretations of them. She's not obligated to give her individual blog entries a name at all (or to do anything else.) Should they then just be submitted as a date?
I'd suggest to change the editorialized submission title, as it predisposes people to share opinions that can easily be unrelated to the article's contents in question.
Editorializing is prone to abuse, but sometimes it is necessary on various grounds, such as the original title of an article being obtuse, misleading or even offensive. A good title should convey the nature of the subject matter and why it is worth reading. Nothing else.
I'm sure the good mods have considered it. I think what causes a lot of editorializing even when OP wants to put the original headline is is the character limit on submission titles.
IMO there should be two titles, the resources given title and an editorial title which would at least initially be provided by the submitter if they felt the given title was not descriptive. That should curtail titular editorialisations.
At some point we need to have a talk about the "no editorialized titles" rule, because while I agree that there's a risk of having the submitter inject their own bias, a title of "Sarepta. Why?" is totally beyond useless for a news aggregator website that isn't exclusively tailored for pharma.
I propose two fields when submitting a link: the original title, and an optional "additional context" field.
Yes, this is a real problem, verbatim titles are often far from the "optimal" title. In some cases the original title provides almost no information about the content.
The question is what's better than a strict "no editorialization" rule.
It's not editorializing. It's framing a discussion of a certain part of a web page that is not an article by using a title that is a factual statement about said web page. The obvious "workaround" is to publish some low-effort tweet or blog post or whatever, which further muddies the waters re: the other "guideline" which says you should submit primary sources if possible.
I get wanting to take a hard line on titles, but I think the "guideline" as written is confusing. The bit about editorializing should be taken out, to make it clear that actual editorializing isn't precisely what's prohibited.
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