Is everything a localised issue here?

Question

It is becoming rapidly clear to me, partly through dating an American, partly through spending time on this site, that employee rights are very different in the US from Europe, or at least from the UK. I'm sure they are also very different from both in India, for example.

As a result, many questions have a very different answer in one country from another, because the risk of serious repercussions is very different.

Should we encourage people to clarify before answering? If so, do we not risk having multiple different questions, which appear exactly the same to the casual browser?

Or do we put up with having multiple conflicting answers, all of which are probably correct in the locale of the author, but the highest voted answer will depend much on who views it and (perhaps) at what time it was posted?

Any suggestions as to the best way to handle this?

For what it's worth, I was prompted to ask this as a result of HLGEM's answer to the office romance question, which is in stark contrast to mine but I suspect we may both be correct in our own country and the author's locale is unclear. But this is not the first example I've seen like this.

Answer 1

Should we encourage people to clarify before answering?

Yes. In case there is any doubt... you should get the question clarified BEFORE you answer. Otherwise you introduce noise. The biggest problem I see with The Workplace is noise. If you do not know enough about the question to answer wait until it is clarified. If someone answers before it is clarified do not reward them with up votes unless once the answer is clarified their answer still fits.

Assuming that the location is US is not correct unless you have researched the OP's other questions and they are all US. If you do research and find that a poster is consistently asking about a country edit the question to include that. The OP can correct but usually if they are asking about someplace other than their usual location they will specify that in the question.

Answer 2

I'd just like to explicitly speak out against localizing answers. I think the responsibility explicitly falls on to the question in these cases.

Why not do it in answers?

• 99% of answers might be wrong for the asker if we just throw answers by location at every question
• We're assuming, not reading what the problem is - that's a big enough reason to close the question. You can never know if your solution is right if you don't actually know the problem.
• Each and every question on the site could have dozens of only slightly different answers explicitly for each nation, possibly multiplied by different solutions per nation.
• It's suddenly valid to post the exact same answer with a different country "tag" just because what works for this answer in the US also applies in Canada.
• Suddenly the people being the most generous (answerers) are expected to do more work for the asker for no good reason. That's just rude.
• The accepted answer now means "Thank #$&^, someone guessed what nation I'm from!" not anything to do with validity to a specific situation. Suddenly generic questions have nation-specific accepted answers. What's up with that?
• Votes are now slanted by nation; "Hey, this advice for the US sounds legit but I have no idea what these other 10 answers are about". Double god help me if my nation falls on page two or three and I have to search multiple pages!
• I have to resort to Ctrl-F to find the answer pertaining to a nation I care about (and god help me if I search USA instead of "U.S." or "United States" or "America" etc.)

Making answers localized is a nightmare. Imagine if programming problems on Stack Overflow were all language agnostic and we played a guessing game of languages trying to explain every possible way to iterate 1. That doesn't help anyone except the exceedingly rare person who isn't actually interested in practical advice, just a list (a Bad Thing) of all ways to do something.

When localization matters, the burden falls on the question.

Answer 3

I think, your question already contains the answer: very often, the questions are localized. Not all, however.

Say, the question about an office romance. Let us assume there was no country specified.
In a Western culture, it does not lead to immediate layoff, but it is so in many Asian countries.
So someone may answer something like "never ever disclose the fact of your office romance if you are working in a Thai company".

More similar examples:
"Never ever disclose your side projects, even on weekends" (in a context of Russian I.T. company).
"Always tell people what they want to hear, not how the things are in real" (in a context of India)

As I understand the ultimate purpose of SO, it is not that much about answering a particular question. ^{(don't kill me now, let me explain myself)} Instead, it is a resource of clear, low-noise information.
Hence, the selected answer only reflects the fact it was most useful for the asker. And the most upvoted answer only shows its usefulness for the voters. No less, no more.

In this context, let's get back to the sample above. Is this answer valid? Yes. Will it be the most upvoted? No. Is it still useful? Certainly, yes. It will be searchable, and the future visitors will use it for their benefit.

On the other hand, the asker may restrict their question, in order to direct the community to answer in terms of a specific area or location. And of course, if the area is too wide, it will reduce the overall quality of the answers.

What can be done? Tags and social pressure, as stated here: How should we handle cultural issues?