SOme questions may be USA specifici (e.g., freedom of information act)
We should have a system of tags for countries.
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I think the tags us, germany are enough. I don't see what else could improve the process. Do you have something specific in mind? – Vince May 8 '13 at 21:11
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should we stick with some country codes? or any ideas on use us vs usa vs united-states – Dmitry Kachaev May 8 '13 at 21:39
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@Vince : the term 'us' has multiple definitions. (eg, the one like 'we') ... it should be changed to 'united-states' or 'usa', or something less bad. ... and then I read your comment below, so nevermind – Joe May 12 '13 at 11:28
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I second Joe's suggestion for USA instead of US – userJT May 16 '13 at 19:33
My instinct is to use country codes, just because there will probably be cases where a common name is ambiguous. It would be kind of neato if the country tags could have little flag icons, like some of the vendor-specific Stack Overflow tags have.
But I also think that most questions will be country specific.
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so just curious... how, as a community, do we close discussion on questions like this and move on? I haven't been particularly involved in meta boards for other SE sites. – Joe Germuska May 10 '13 at 21:04
The exact format is indeed quite a problem.
I think there is no definitive answer, because there will always be new debates, up to discussing whether Palestine is a country, or should we say a territory, ... And this is not the point of OpenData.SE.
There are quite some such questions on Travel.SE, look at one of them that raises the issue of regions and countries sharing the same name.
I think we should simply stick to simplicity and clear use. I would say, let's keep the simple English country names: germany, india. For the US, the only reason it is so is that the first few questions included the tag us, before anyone took action. But I suggest, once someone has enough privilege to create synonyms, to replace it by usa.
Ideally, there should be some sort of systematic naming of country tags, ie "Based on the ISO system for countries", or "Based on the Travel.SE tags for countries".
The problem already occured on StackOverflow, and with much more severe form. There are group of products grouped in product, and they are versioned, for example JSF is a group of technologies including PrimeFaces, RichFaces, IceFaces, each of them have version. So should the question tagged with primefaces-3.4 be automatically assigned to category primefaces and category jsf? But such feature was not implemented. See the details for example here: A proposal for tag hierarchy on Stack Exchange sites
If such feature was not implemented for StackOverflow, it won't be implemented for any other site as well. So you should use 5 available tags wisely.
As a rule of the thumb, I'll just tag the question with the most appropriate region, for example germany for questions specific about Germany, and europe for questions targeting multiple countries. Where the question is about Germany, but the domain is related to European Union and the database could be managed by EU, I'd add eu tag then. If the question is targeting German-speaking countries, I'd use 3 country tags. For questions targeting French-speaking countries of Africa, I'd simply use africa tag.
