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>which the site guidelines ask people to use except when it's misleading or baity Or too long and needs shortening. In these cases, what, if there is one, is t

• dang 6y ago
  Good question! (The limit is 80 chars.) The answer is to truncate, not rewrite. However, truncation isn't always natural. One shouldn't start abbreviating words, for example, that don't normally get abbreviated. In cases where there isn't a natural way to truncate, a better option is to look at the HTML doc title, a subtitle, a heading, or sometimes even a photo caption, that say accurately and neutrally what the article is about. There's often also a sentence in the opening paragraph that can be used. Sometimes none of those exists, but you can find a representative phrase lurking in the article body. The key is that it be representative though, not cherry-picked. There's a bit of interpretation involved there, but you can nearly always pick out the general-overview phrase if one exists. They have a distinctive quality. Rewriting should only be a last resort. When we edit titles, we always try to use representative language from the article and rather than to make up language ourselves.