How can we encourage posters to mention their country of study/work?

Question

Academic systems and cultures vary widely between countries, and answers will depend heavily on this context.

I have come across many questions, where the country has not been stated – presumably because it had not occurred to the poster that this information was relevant. Now one can of course ask in the comments to add this – but this causes a delay and gets a bit repetitive.

Is there a way to encourage posters to state the country which is relevant? I was envisioning something like a drop-down menu when asking a question, or at least a line reminding posters that it might be relevant.

Answer 1

What we (or actually Stack Exchange employees) could do is to add a tag alert for tags that are prone to be country- or field-specific.

Tag alerts are special, tag-specific info messages that pop-up whenever the author adds certain tags to a question they are composing. To such an alert in action, begin asking a question on Stack Overflow and add the SQL tag to it. You can read more about tag alerts on here. I know that at least Graphic Design and Anime & Manga also have tag alerts.

As for tags to which we could consider applying this, graduate-admissions and phd come to mind. In particular graduate-admissions could do with a tag alert anyway, as I have the feeling that we are closing a lot of questions with this tag and a tag alert could help askers to ask appropriate questions or see that their question is not appropriate for our site in the first place.

Answer 2

Reminders don't work. On CS Theory, they modified the greyed-out text that appears in the subject line when you start a question, so it emphasizes that questions should be research-level questions about theoretical computer science. It made zero difference: they still get just as many questions about undergrad exercises and fixing Windows as they always got.