I suppose I subscribe to the sauoq school of thought, if not for completely the same reasons. Certainly, Aristotle comes closer to my reasoning.

I have thought that in the last few years, much of the renaming has been done for reasons of dogma, and I don't think it has been a net benefit to the site overall.

The simple fact of the matter is that this site is now over six years old and has accumulated over 63000 top level posts, and over half a million responses of some sort or another. No matter how good your title is, some things just aren't going to be found again. That's life.

But some nodes just aren't worth it. Sometimes you just have to let go, and let an oddly-titled node sink below the surface and disappear. Newcomers posting questions don't trawl through the archives to see whether the question has already been asked. Searching is mainly for archeologists who have been here for a while and are patient enough to go and sift through ancient nodes, in order to link them back to present discussions. But they're looking for nodes they know already exist.

Another problem with retitling is that all the nodes wind up adhering to rigid orthodoxy (cold, hard objectivity), and the end result is that overall footprint of the search space is reduced. It reduces the possibility for serendipitous discoveries. Chance no longer has a place.

For years we seemed to get by just fine with only a dozen or so editors, half of which were rarely online anyway. I don't know when it happened, but while I had my back turned, I now notice in surprise that there are 44 (!) editors. Even though in absolute terms, the number of top-level nodes created has been declining since 2001.

I think the real problem is that there are too many editors. I am aware of no other forum that expends as much effort as Perlmonks in renaming titles. Maybe we should all just chill out, and take the crunchy with the smooth.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

In reply to Re: Regarding the recent node retitling sentiments by grinder
in thread Regarding the recent node retitling sentiments by Aristotle

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