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Some questions on this site are likely to be somewhat localised to an individual country or group of countries. As such, I feel it may be important to ensure such questions are tagged as such to ensure that they are clear, however it can be a fine line between a tag becoming a meta tag.

This question is posed because Stack Exchange has a general policy against meta tags.

As such, I think we need to make an early decision on whether tags such as , or are permitted and if so where we draw the line.

There are three options that I can think of, though further options are of course welcome:

  • we expressly permit them even though they may be meta tags
  • we permit them only when attached to a non-meta tag, such as
  • we follow the Stack Exchange policy of no meta tags whatsoever
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I'm not sure those are actually meta tags in the sense that tags like or are. You're specifying that the question deals only with political systems, just like a Stack Overflow user might tag something to indicate you're dealing with C++ and not some other language. Someone who knows a lot about UK politics could favorite the tag, so they seem valid to me

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  • The concern is that meta tags are loosely defined as "tags that cannot stand on their own" and using this definition it could be argued that they are - as you would most likely need something such as uk and parliament.
    – Graham Wager
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 22:13
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    I agree, a better question would be how localized are we going to allow these to go. We probably don't want anyone trying to create a tag for Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan politics.
    – mootinator
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 22:13
  • @mootinator completely agree, hence the "where we draw the line", though that may have to become a secondary meta question of its own!
    – Graham Wager
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 22:17
  • @GrahamWager Done ;)
    – mootinator
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 22:18
  • We should allow the country meta-tag in order for someone to illustrate that his question may be only related to a specific country. If the question is of interest for a broader audience we can still tag it that way
    – Sven Clement
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 23:22
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I've added two tags in my first question, and , without having read this discussion. Both tags seemed relevant, especially since (right now) the site seems a bit US-centric, and I didn't think twice about adding them, they just came out naturally.

I think Michael's analogy with SO tags is perfect, questions that are specific to a country (or a union of countries) should be tagged as such.

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  • These are two different entities, Europe is not the same as the EU. For about both these tags are correct.
    – fuxia
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 9:01
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    @toscho Hm? I know, that's why I added them both ;)
    – yannis
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 9:02
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I agree with this as long as the premise of the question being asked is about Domestic matters.

For Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations questions however it seems silly to require that all affected countries be tagged as often foreign relationships and conflicts affect the world.

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