I noticed this question which made me wonder what the policy here is regarding localized questions. There seems to have been a discussion of "too localized" questions based on research area specific questions, but only meta question regarding country specific questions is about whether or not US-specific questions are on-topic?
Does the current state of the "rules" approve of country specific question, if so to what extend?
Few hours ago this question was deleted. Even though not the best question ever, I think it offers some good perspective. It's localized to country? Yes. Are the answers specific to a particular discipline? No. Now how about this question? Or this, this, this and this?
I think, we should be very careful not to make out of this site a US-centric place with otherwise some valuable discussion about general academic topic. In my opinion questions about admissions to universities around the world are appropriate here.
As I said in a comment to Are US-specific questions OK? I am not sure questions are really ever country specific. I believe your example question What is a "TV-L 13" position? is pretty localized, but not so much because of the German nature of it. I think the question is potentially useful for anyone in Germany, anyone applying for a German job, or anyone considering hiring someone currently working in Germany. It also has limited use for people trying to understand the employment status of graduate students across different countries.
I believe some questions are very much country-specific. For example, there are quite some differences between the usual PhD programmes in the US and the UK and I have spent some time trying to think of an answer before somehow inferring that the question refers to something I wouldn't know about.
I don't see this as a problem as such (after all, academia is very international and people move between continents all the time), but I would like to have a way of pointing out to the reader whether the question is (potentially) country-specific or not. Otherwise there will/might be answers that don't apply to the question at all, and readers can happily skip the ones that they won't be able to answer.
I think there should be a tag/tags or at least a convention for questions to point out the country in the same way as people generally point out their particular discipline.
Any opinions on that?
I want to support the comment by spbail about adding country and discipline. At the same time I think such restrictions should not prevent answers from being more generally applicable if they provide new insights or provide a different perspective. I have experienced answering a question that seemed general but later turned out to be changed to country specific. The answer then seemed a bit out of place but I still would maintain that a wider spectrum of answrers is a positive.
I think many who pose questions do not realize they are in an international arena, hence the many "too localized" and other forms of narrow questions. So finding a way to be constructive both in the specific and in the general would be a beneficial as I see it.
So should then answers also be "labelled"? and will the site members support wider ranges of answers to narrow questions for the benefit of everyone? those are some of the question which I keep thinking about.
