Update: ok, ok, this was a wee bit premature - here's the follow-up proposal: MCVExit redux: I don't need a milkshake to know when I've missed the mark

Five years ago, we set out to write up some guidelines for folks asking debugging questions on Stack Overflow. Andrew Thompson, author of the much-loved guide to writing a Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example, gave us a solid start; with a few tweaks and updates over the years this guide continues to provide one of the most-viewed and most-effective bits of guidance for askers.

Fast-forward to today: we have a brand-new Ask Question Wizard. And one of the most popular requests for improvement is... Encourage folks to create an MCVE. This surprised no one, as it'd already come up several times in testing - so the team recently sat down to figure out how to better integrate this venerable guidance.

...And we immediately ran into an unfortunately familiar problem:

MCVE is an awkward name.

The full title is long, and the initialism is... Also long. I regretted it almost immediately, but couldn't change it. Heck, I had to add a little blurb at the bottom just to help folks find it when searching for "MVCE". Turns out it's hard to have a discussion when folks keep forgetting the name of the thing they're talking about...

So our intrepid new Product Manager Meg sat down and tried to figure out something that'd convey the same message more elegantly... And one word quickly jumped out at her:

Minimal, Reproducible Example (or, "reprex")

Yep. The common factor for both Complete and Verifiable is the need to provide a way for others to reproduce the problem. So... We could just call this thing a Minimal, Reproducible Example. Even better than a clunky acronym, it has a meaningful and elegant portmanteau, "reprex", which was originally coined by members of the R community, some of whom have been maintaining a similar FAQ here for many years. We were especially inspired by Jenny Bryan's reprex library for R and her "help me help you" philosophy behind encouraging question-askers to create reproducible examples that make conversations about code more productive and efficient.

After mulling it over for a while, I couldn't think of a good reason not to change this other than my own inability to consistently spell "reproducible". A big part of the philosophy of the article has always been "short and clear" - so why not make the title itself shorter, and the URL less awkward? Provided we didn't break the thousands of existing links in the process, that is.

So Jon Chan has set up a redirect to allow both /help/mcve and /help/reprex to take folks to the same place, the same old article with a new shorter title. While updating the title, I've taken the opportunity to also work in a few other suggestions from the team:

"you will get better answers" -> "people will be better able to provide help" Let's face it, there's no guarantee you'll get a good answer no matter how good your question is - you're just increasing the odds.

"tabs make a mess on Stack Overflow" -> "tabs might not get correctly formatted" The subtle danger here has always been that tabs seem to work on Stack Overflow... Just like they probably seem to work in your favorite editor. Until they don't, and your co-workers murder you with a classic can of diet soda. Again, precision is important here: the danger isn't that tabs will always break, it's that they won't always work.

Removed the now-redundant "make sure it's complete" section The final guidance in the Verifiable->Reproducible section was already very close to this; with a few more tweaks it can entirely supplant it.

"'It doesn't work' is not a problem statement" -> "isn't descriptive enough to help people understand your problem. There are lots of ways you can better describe your problem so it's reproducible." Here I got preachy instead of trying to help folks understand the reason for the advice. Meg suggested a more descriptive explanation.

And a few other minor tweaks here and there. All in all, a solid set of improvements, I think... But decide for yourself: /help/reprex. And then let me know what you think...

Unfeaturing this after a day - got plenty to chew on, and hopefully most folks interested have seen it by now. Big thanks to everyone who responded - lotsa good ideas and fair critiques, will think about this for a bit and discuss more later.