Some users of the site have religious reasons for not spelling out 'God', for example in the original version of this question:
The title of a question has higher visibility than the body, so it may be reasonable to have one rule for one and one rule for the other.
I think that alternate spellings of "God" shouldn't be changed. It should be up to the author to decide how he or she wants to spell words, whether in religious words or in ordinary words that have multiple possible spellings (such as American/British variants). Spellings, like the content of the posts themselves, shouldn't be forced to conform with any particular religious or academic standard.
There might be religious reasons for or against obfuscating the name. What is important is respecting the authors' chosen spellings in their posts, even if those spellings happen to be offensive to others.
I don't think the search engine is an important consideration. Language naturally allows for multiple ways to say the same thing, and "God" vs. "G-d" is only one of many ways to say the same thing: Lord, Deity, Supreme Being, The Name, not to mention Jehovah, Yahweh, Yhwh, Yhvh and any other number of spellings of it and related terms.
In principle, unusual spellings such as "G d" could be edited, like any other content of posts, for the sake of readability. However, if the spelling is intentional – and certainly if the author makes it clear that changing the spelling is against his or her wishes – then it would be inappropriate to insist on "God" or any other specific spelling.
"G-d" or "G d" are only likely to cause momentary confusion at worst, and "God" isn't a particularly useful search term on this site. There isn't any strong reason not to defer to the author's preference.
Here's how my thinking goes. We have two goals that will sometimes conflict:
So to a large extent we do want to accommodate the religious practices of our users for how they refer to the divine being. So, for example, for the Tetragrammaton, you'll see all of these in our posts:
All of these are acceptable, except perhaps the use of small caps because it's using unicode and may limit the ability to search etc.
Individuals may have personal practices that differ from any of these. I know of at least one Stack Exchange user who really doesn't like using capital letters. It is appropriate that their posts be edited. Likewise idiosyncratic punctuation (for example, putting spaces around every punctuation symbol), or unintentional typos, are almost always fixed.
Some uncommon practices are acceptable. If a Muslim user on this site wrote "Jesus (PBUM)" we'd allow it, but if a Jewish user wrote "the false prophet Jesus", that wouldn't stand. These are common sense examples, and I don't think anyone would disagree.
For the Tetragrammaton, if someone wrote "yahweh", "jehovah" or even "Hashem", most of us would probably consider them typos or lazy capitalisation, and would edit it. While many people prefer the name "Yeshua" to "Jesus", if someone was to use a very obscure transliteration or to invent their own, it would be appropriate to question their use of it in a comment.
So to the specific case asked about. Personally, I don't like either, and I find that both disrupt my reading. But "G-d" at least has a long history of use by Jews. If a Jewish adherent wanted to use it I think we'd have to allow it. "G d" does not to my knowledge have any substantial history of use, and appears to be a personal innovation. It may make break some search systems when you want to search for a quoted phrase. Google's search engine is magic, but I don't know if even it would handle this. It almost certainly would be sub-optimal for screen reader users, as it breaks one word into two, and would be read out as two single letters. Jewish screen reader users may have configured their systems to read out "G-d" as "God" but they would not have for "G d". And if a regular space is used rather than a non-breaking space then the G and d may appear on different lines (here's a real post viewed in the site's mobile version):
For these reasons, I think it is acceptable to fix titles containing "G d" at least, possibly main posts too. But if there is a significant community who does this practice, that would be enough to make me reconsider.
Whenever a typographical error causes wrong spelling, or inaccurate capitalisation, then it should be corrected, but correction is not necessarily the same thing as editing.
When a person chooses to write G_d instead of God, it is not a typo. Their reasons for choosing that format should be respected, whatever those reasons are.
Now, if a person wrote god but failure to capitalise the 'g' was a typo, then it should be corrected, but sometimes it is important to use lower case 'g' if this is to contrast many gods with the one God of the Bible.
Using those two examples, see now how editing would be a different matter. To change G_d to God when the person writing G_d had religious reasons for that format, would be to force your own view on the person. The editor would, in effect, be saying, "I disagree with your religious reasons and you are not being allowed to hold them here."
The second example of editing would be to change god to God when the writer had intended a 'god' to contrast with the 'God'. A minority of religious people choose to write that Jesus is "a god" but they always capitalise Jehovah God. No matter if others disagree with that, it would be wrong to go around editing their every occurrence of so using lower case and upper case 'G'. They intend it. It is not a typo.
That is my simple answer, based on whether a typographical error needs to be corrected, or if editing results in a form of censorship regarding the writer's personal views. Yes to amending typos; no to editing deliberate format that has been chosen for religious reasons.
Since the wording of the initial post says religious reasons, I will qualify and say I don’t speak for others and I have not stated my reasons or views
I fail to see how what is probably the most common word, namely god, on this part of the site that I’m on would be the best argument for editing the name as a search term. It is so common that you would get a hit on the majority of posts. Search terms from what I see are not limited to titles. Also isn’t that what tags are for to help search based on subjects?
Also it’s not like one is incapable of working out what is meant. It’s fairly straight forward and simple to dicipher
If you are going to use a search term you would use a far more specific term or phrase.
Also if these are the rules I’ll oblige but it’s not specified in the site rules and the fact that someone out of (whatever their reason) can edit the title or the content when it’s not against the rules is rather strong arming.
Furthermore should we edit the sacred tetragrammaton in ancient manuscripts what about the nomen sacrum or as I would put it the sacred bigrammatons or the divine bigrammatons. No we don’t change them. They were the author’s choice and the new author addressing the written manuscripts can choose whatever they want to keep it going or to use a different noun.
Just because you don’t ascribe/share a certain view, the fact that it’s not against site rules should not mean editing based on the personal preference of those in moderating power.
But what do I know? I could be completely wrong and if so, then I apologize.
Titles are highly visible on the home page search engines, and we need to prevent the titles from causing confusion to casual Google searchers.
We should edit the title to 'God', and comment, linking to this port, to suggest that the OP considers editing the title to something acceptable to them which is also less likely to cause confusion (as happened in the case linked in the question).
