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It seems inevitable that we'll have country specific questions as this question assumes:

How should we tag country-specific questions?

Where do we draw the line? We probably don't want questions, but might be of interest of a broad enough audience.

Where do we want to draw the line?

3 Answers 3

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The SE system automatically removes poorly used new tags, so I wouldn't say the "one-off" rule needs to be applied manually.

It's a tough question, as each area has different opinions as to how important their area is. We could limit to countries and international organisations, but then would we consider to be the limit, or would be appropriate? (I'm not after debate as to whether Scotland is a country here by the way :P)

I think this may be an issue where we have to wait and see how things progress naturally, let the auto-removal do it's job and re-tag to the broadest possible area in which the question is appropriate.

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    Agreed. Maybe Moose-Jaw has a unique political climate that we can learn lessons from. Start out by giving tags the benefit of the doubt and then see how things pan out in the coming months.
    – Brock Adams
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 23:58
  • Well, scotland for example has it's own political systems. I'd say down to major cities level (capitals and any other large cities of international interest [capitals of states, most populated in large countries like the USA])
    – UKB
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 23:36
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I think we can go very localised. It may be interesting to read this discussion on Meta Travel SE. Too localised means:

This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.

In analogy to the answer I linked above, I would say:

  • Political process in Belmopan in general → on-topic, it might help future visitors. As long as we're small, it's unlikely; however, it's possible.
  • Motivation for the decision of the city council of Belmopan to temporarily move a bicycle shed by two blocks in 1988 → too localised, extremely unlikely to ever help anybody
  • Candidates for the post of secretary for a fringe opposition party in the village council of Placencia, Belize in 2002→ off-topic for the same reason

As long as this site is small, small questions may be unlikely to help many future visitors. But a site like Stack Overflow has some tags relating to rather obscure programming languages, Movies&TV has tags relating to some rather obscure movies, and Travel permits questions on rather local travel destinations. Localised is relative, and in my opinion, if there is any reasonable hope for a question to be useful to future visitors, we ought to allow it.

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I would say that we should draw the line by asking the question Is this a one-off question for this topic (tag), or will it describe a group of questions? If the answer is one-off, then it should not be a tag. If it could be used validly to describe a reasonable amount of questions on the site, than it should be a tag.

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