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Recently I was reading and answering the question Do I need to sit for TOEFL or SAT?

I searched for relevant tags and saw we have three tags:

Asia with 22 questions

South-East-Asia with 1 question: How should one advertise a program if it doesn't lead to jobs?

South-Asia with 1 question: Is being socially reclusive okay for a graduate student?

Since the last two tags are not really useful and identical to the first tag, should these South-East-Asia and South-Asia be merged in to the Asia tag?

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    Not a regular here, but based on reading Should europe tag be synonyms with eu?, I think I'd be careful when merging those tags because Asia is sooo big, and not all regions share the common culture... (my opinion is only about the tags, not if those questions need those tags or not)
    – Andrew T.
    Mar 20, 2019 at 17:10

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No, the differences between South East Asia and South Asia are clear.

If a changes were to be made, perhaps removing the "Asia" tag as too broad would be an option.

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There are some international differences in what these phrases mean. For example, AIUI in the USA, "South Asia" means "India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh" (maybe Nepal too). In other places that might be called "The Indian Subcontinent", and "south asia" might be taken more geographically.

I'm not sure whether "South-east asia" has similar non-geographic meanings. In my mind it refers to the peninsula that Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc., sit on, but that might not be true for everybody.

So, these meanings are different for different people.

I'm not sure what this means for the appropriateness of the tags, except perhaps that if they exist, the tag wikis need to be really clear.

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  • They're common enough terms to be defined on Wikipedia: South Asia and Southeast Asia. (Apart from the countries you've mentioned, the latter includes several of the island countries, and the former sometimes is defined to include Afghanistan.) I guess the Wikipedia definitions would make for good starting points for clearer tag wikis.
    – Anyon
    Sep 18, 2019 at 23:11
  • Ah! Right. Still, I think these are terms that only have meaning in specific places (I'd never heard "south asia" until I came to the US.
    – Flyto
    Sep 19, 2019 at 4:18

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