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Let's get real here. Academics in mathematics ARE different from acedemics in medicine. We should embrace the real world !

This is not to prevent general questions.

For example a general tag of tenure promotion could have multiple questions in different fields. Just like on StackOverflow questions about X-Path could be asked specifically to various languages (Java, C, Perl).

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    Could you give some examples of issues that would necessitate separate tags? – aeismail Mar 27 '13 at 13:42
  • Please avoid doing too many new tagging at once, it somehow brings back the question to the main page, which can be confusing. Please also avoid to create too many tags at once, check first whether a given tag is interesting or not. A tag containing only one or two questions is probably not worth creating. – user102 Mar 27 '13 at 13:56
  • As aeismail said, if you have some examples where it's needed, then we can definitely have a look at it. If you just want more tags because you feel like it would be better, then it might be more polluting than helping. – user102 Mar 27 '13 at 14:04
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    Why are there close votes. This is a really useful discussion. – StrongBad May 20 '13 at 19:52
  • I now see that the close votes are because it is a duplicate... and am now voting to close. – StrongBad May 22 '13 at 8:05
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Academia in mathematics is not always different from academia in medicine. There are plenty of aspects (publications, career, PhD supervision, etc) that are shared across disciplines. That's the whole point of this site. And this is very real.

EDIT: For instance, consider your question Are there Conference Proceedings that have impact factor?. You just tagged it with "medicine", although the notion of Impact Factor is common to every publication-based field. walkmanyi's answer (that you accepted) is not specific at all to medicine. My answer is actually only for computer science.

In other words, your question is very generic, and could interest any one who cares about publishing into a conference. However, now, it has the tag "medicine", which might make some people think that it's a medicine-specific question, and ignore it. I can't see anything gained by adding this tag, but I can clearly see what you've lost.

In the end, it's your question, so you can do pretty much what you want with it, but please be aware that tags that are considered as unnecessary might be removed.

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  • Well. We will loose a lot of visitors to quora then. This is just too arrogant. – userJT Mar 27 '13 at 13:39
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    @user56: How is it arrogant?! Believing that your own field is so special that it's completely different from any other field is not particularly modest ... In addition, it's perfectly OK to ask a question that is field specific, and the answers can also field specific. Let's just not make any clear difference from the beginning. – user102 Mar 27 '13 at 13:42
  • This is like asking folks on StackOverflow to have a special site for each language and not to have a tag for Java, Perl, R, Python !!!!!! The point is that questions about string operations have a tag and answer/question in each 'field' is also tagged with a language. – userJT Mar 27 '13 at 13:42
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    @user56: I believe you have enough reputation to create some tags, so nothing is preventing you from creating them. – user102 Mar 27 '13 at 13:45
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    @user56 I understand what you're saying and yes, some questions might be field specific but a lot of the questions I read here are written to be applicable to a wide range of fields. I think there is nothing wrong with having field-specific tags but I also prefer, as a general rule, to have questions asked in the most general ways (as long as the question is still effective) so the answer ends up being useful to the greatest number of people. – earthling Mar 31 '13 at 12:43
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The question of field explicit vs. generalized questions on this site seems to be a great divide.

I can see that some aspects of certain fields are just that, field specific. At the same time, I have seen many good questions, which when given a general answer, turns out to have been written in an implicit understanding they are very specific. The general answer then gets lots of comments about "not applying" to this and that and in addition, the question gets changed to become narrow and more specific.

Ok, so a specific question is probably better than a general one since it can be answer very specifically. But then we end up with many similar questions each specifically targetting a narrow field (duplicates?). In addition we close questions that are too narrow. So it seems to me that being general is what we are looking for and acccepting answers that apply to the question in the general sense.

The problem as I see it is to make new users aware of the fact that answers may be more general than what they expect.

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