9

I see quite a few questions that are culture specific that tend to attract US Centric answers. As a result the answers are completely wrong because the way things work in US are completely different than how they work in Europe, India, or most of the rest of the world outside US and Canada.

Is there anything we can do to highlight the Country specific tags so that answerers are more likely to take note of the specific culture being asked about?

2
  • 1
    I edit the country into the post body when I see stuff like this. Tags are really for categorization, for searching and for SEO, and they don't really work out too well as a substitute for content in the post body. I suspect many people look at the content, not the tags. I know that's confused me a few times...
    – jmort253
    Apr 25, 2014 at 18:41
  • 6
    Stack Exchange has the ability to add images to tags, at least on Stack Overflow... just a thought, but maybe the "sponsored tags" feature could be used to let us put country flags on those tags...
    – jmort253
    Apr 25, 2014 at 18:42

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
10

We have some location tags already and I don't see a problem with them; I don't think they're "meta" in the same way that, say, "homework" is a meta tag. If the locale is important to the question then calling that out in a tag seems kosher to me.

However, regardless of what we do with tags, if the locale matters I want to see that in the question body. Tags are too easy to miss (though I love the idea of adding flags, which would make these ones more prominent).

Please, if you see a question where locale matters and it's not stated, ask for that information and vote to put on hold until we get it. (Feel free to also bring up in chat for more votes if it looks like premature answers are a risk.) If the information was provided in a comment, please edit it into the question. And if you see answers that don't apply to the stated locale, please comment and/or flag.

0

For what it's worth, when I'm on a browser (the app doesn't support it), I deliberately filter out questions tagged as coming from countries where I know the work culture is so different that there is nothing meaningful I can offer.

That policy is harder to implement when not automated.

-2

Adding a tag to cover which country it is for would be a meta tag; these types of tags don't describe the content of the question and are discouraged. This information should be included in the body of the question instead.

That said I do like jmorts idea of having a flag in the tags that could identify whee he user is posting from. If this could pick up from their IP all the better as that stops the user from having to add it themselves.

2
  • 3
    It's debatable whether or not country tags are meta tags. As a matter of fact, we debated it early on. The final decision was to have country tags, and despite being one of the dissenters early on, I can now see where they have value. So long as we continue to do as you suggest and put that content in the body, having the tags could be helpful to people who want to try to filter by country,
    – jmort253
    Apr 27, 2014 at 3:01
  • [cont'd] while making them more visible may prevent them from being overlooked if someone forgets to put the info in the body.
    – jmort253
    Apr 27, 2014 at 3:05

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .