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So, it seems like half the time when I visit this SE site, when I look at questions here, I wind up leaving a comment to the effect of "What location are you in? Different places have different laws" on questions that haven't specified their location. Different countries have different laws, different states have different laws, heck - even different cities can have different laws! Without knowing the jurisdiction of the question, it seems scarcely possible to give an accurate answer to nearly any question about the law.

Should we make it a rule that all questions must include a location tag, similar to how the RPG StackExchange site makes it a rule that all questions must include a tag that indicates what game system the question is about?

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  • This has been discussed and rehashed since this SE was created – see jurisdiction. I'm wondering if this question should be closed as a duplicate?
    – feetwet Mod
    Dec 17, 2020 at 19:54
  • Note esp. law.meta.stackexchange.com/a/970/4501 which references the RPG policy, and the disparity in active users.
    – user6726
    Dec 17, 2020 at 22:22

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I don't know how you would effectively require such a tag, but it is certainly a good idea. You can elaborate on the RPG SE rule. Here are the problems that I see with the proposal. First, some questions are not jurisdiction-dependent at least in the geographical sense, hence we have questions about "common law" which should not be burdened with tags about all of the common law nations. Second, tags are not the only or best way to give that information, main text is better. Third, jurisdiction-omission is often a result of the fact that most people don't know that there is more than one system – that's a fact that maybe we need to educate people about. But furthermore, it's not just country, it can be state, county or town / school district (we get questions about school districts and zoning stuff which is hyper-local). Questions about copyright are sort of national, but sort of independent of nation, depending on the exact question, and we don't need a town-county-state-country location string. And then finally, would you be comfortable publishing your home address in an SE question? Once you get down the level of town, you're requiring a somewhat creepy level of personal information.

I don't think a system change (of some kind) would eliminate "the problem", but it might reduce it (people just do not read the help center info). So I'd say, what exactly do you propose and what do you think it would accomplish (positive and negative results).

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  • as an avid user of RPG-SE: the gist is to either tag the game system, game design or System agnostic. Common-law would be just as valid as any state, or code civil or code of Hammurabi.
    – Trish
    Dec 19, 2020 at 2:54

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