How should we handle cultural issues?

Question

Just glancing over a few questions, I see many that are culture specific, eg:

• What are some guidelines for appropriate social drinking at work? - this will vary greatly between secular and Muslim cultures (also note, this is a list question)
• Switching jobs - how soon is too soon?
• How to select interview attire for a technical job interview?

How should we handle issues that are affected by culture, whether that is per country (includes culture and religion), per role (eg different for an accountant or a programmer) or per branch (eg military to the arts)?

E.g. Is multiple questions with tags the way to go?

Answer 1

On Judaism.SE, we have the same sort of issue due to different sub-cultures within Judaism maintaining traditions including different practices and beliefs and due to different rabbinic authorities giving different rulings on various issues. The community tends to deal with this in one of two ways.

• One is that some questions specify that they're asking about rulings within a particular line of tradition or even according to a specific rabbi. Valid answers to such questions would be within the specified parameters.

• The other, which is actually employed more frequently, is that many questions get multiple equally-valid answers that refer to different traditions or cite authorities who disagree. I actually see this possibility as a strength of the SE model, which allows for multiple answers, taking advantage of the various sets of knowledge and experience that exist in the community.

I think that the same approach should work here. If askers want to specify (within the question body and also possibly by tagging) the culture they're asking within, fine. If not, and answerers are aware that the right answer may differ depending on the cultural context, they should consider noting as much in their answers, and specifying what cultural context [s] their answers address.

Answer 2

I don't think tagging should be used to differentiate these questions. They could be easily missed. For instance, if we had 7 questions all titled:

What are some guidelines for appropriate social drinking at work?

and all 7 of those questions had different tags, it might not be clear to everyone that the scope of the question is somehow tied to the tag.

Tags should be used to categorize questions, but they should not be required for a reader to understand what the question is about. Instead, the question should contain enough detail to stand on it's own without the tags.

On StackOverflow, when I answer a JavaScript question, I can tell the question is about JavaScript simply by reading the question. The questions stand on their own without tags; I don't need the tag in order to tell me it's a JavaScript question. However, when searching for JavaScript questions, the tags are very helpful.

Thus, we should target questions like:

I work in the United States, what are some guidelines for appropriate social drinking at work?

I live in Afghanistan, what are some guidelines for appropriate social drinking at work?

Additionally, these details don't necessarily need to go in the question title. They should also be included in the question body.