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On some large portion of all questions about conferences, it becomes important to know if the conference is in Computer Science, or one of the other fields, that takes conferences seriously as a publication venue.

I was thus thinking we should put something in the tag wiki, to recommend to users of the conference tag, that it is often a good idea to specify their field in the question. Or something like that.

If people think this is a good idea, could someone suggest appropriate wording?

If not, follow Meta practices and downvote this question. :-)

Related to this question Questions about Computer Science - please, make it explicit

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For many of the questions that we receive here it's important to specify the field of interest (not to mention the country). Indeed, Computer Science has some specificities (e.g. importance of conferences), Mathematics has other specificities (e.g. author order, long revision times), the Humanities have others (e.g. books may be more important than journal papers) and so on.

Thus, generally speaking, I don't think Computer Science should be singled out in tags, because otherwise we would have to go through all tags to add the specifities of all other fields.

What we should do is to encourage through comments the questioners to add information about the field whenever we feel that that piece of information is relevant, whether it's a question about conferences, publications, hiring etc.

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    I agree -there is so much variation from field to field that we couldn't keep up with tags. One might find that there are several competing groups in Old English that have different norms and would need separate tags, for example.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Aug 27, 2018 at 14:35
  • I disagree. The trope "we need to know what field you're in to fully answer your question" happens all over tag-space but in my experience there is a significant concentration in the conference tag, so a warning here would be a good way to use a targeted intervention.
    – E.P.
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 10:28
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My feeling is that the tag wiki excerpt won't be particularly effective at transmitting this information, since they're hardly ever read. By the time the user gets to tagging the post they've already finished writing it and they're just trying to get it up and running; reading each tag description in detail is simply not something that's going to happen very often.

However, this is precisely the situation where a tag warning could really help. They look like this:

(source) and they show up when the user adds the tag. The procedure for requesting them is here.

As a starting point for that discussion, I would propose wording of the form:

Tip: different fields treat conferences differently, from primary publication venues (as in computer science) to optional extras.

Questions about conferences get better answers if they specify what field you're working in, so people have enough context to answer well.

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    We probably already have tag warnings activated here: academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1886/20058
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 12:31
  • @MassimoOrtolano Ah. Well, then add one for this, then. (Though, from what I can tell, only the graduate-admissions one is currently active.)
    – E.P.
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 12:32
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Suggestion: Add something to the tag wiki encouraging askers to describe the type of conference: e.g. is it one with peer-reviewed proceedings, and so forth.

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