Regional tag, can we eliminate it in some cases?

Question

This question applies to Australia and New Zealand: Should I be concerned about new helmet laws?

Unfortunately, there's no room to add a new-zealand tag, since we're limited to five tags. Do we really need the regional tag on questions where the region is specified? Is there another solution to this that I'm not seeing? (There's one question that uses the regional tag by itself, because the locations are only indicated in the answers.)

Are people using this tag to find questions? Might we need it down the road if we SE wants the boards to re-evaluate their policies on regional questions?

Answer 1

I would find the actual country tag a better indicator of what I am both looking for and just when reading a question to get context. Realistically I don't think we are going to get to many regions, and by simply stating the country etc. then the regional part is implied.

Answer 2

It's a meta-tag. It doesn't describe the question, it describes the type of question.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

Answer 3

I think we should deprecate/remove regional.

1. Nobody is going to subscribe to it or follow it or specifically look for it. You might subscribe to the tag for a specific region, such as the one you live in or one you frequently visit, but nobody is going to subscribe to a generic regional tag.
2. The posts tagged regional having nothing to do with each other unless they happen to be in the same region. If two questions are about the same region they should share a tag for that region. The regional tag won't help the "Related" questions thing on the right to work better.
3. It's on the first page of our popular tags, and it ultimately doesn't really say what the questions are about. More popular tags are given priority in HTML titles and elsewhere, so we should be paying extra attention to that first page of popular tags.

Basically, I'm saying that regional doesn't help anybody do anything, but does get in the way a little bit.

Answer 4

It appears that nearly all incoming 'regional' questions have been tagged with at least a country locality and in several cases a country + region or city. Perhaps it's time to remove/deprecate the regional tag altogether, as it doesn't seem like a particularly useful indicator.

Answer 5

If an question is tagged as usa or uk it seems quite clear that these tags are for regional questions.

I would be in favour of keeping it if there wasn't a limit on tags, I'd imagine it would have it's use. If you prefer general questions to regional you can add regional to your ignore list.

On second thought, I can see how the tag is useless. It would be like adding a 'Programing Language' tag to every question on Stack Overflow that has PHP, C+, Java, etc...