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I'd like to make a tag for my university students to use when they ask questions here (the tag would be "SHU", for http://www.shu.ac.uk)

I see plenty of good and bad reasons to do so - good for my colleagues and students: track work relevant to us within the community, encourage use of SO, respond in ways that use our understanding of the context; bad: it's a meta-tag, would highlight a sub group on SO, good answers ought to be helpful for everyone regardless of context...

So: I'm seeking approval here before I go ahead and create the tag, for it to be shut off soon after. I also think I'm not the only university out there; so what is true for me would be for other institutions.

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    On another note: pointing your students to SO as an excellent Q&A platform is just fine. But don't point them at it as the primary support forum for your class/course. Any question they ask will have to follow the standards of the site. Duplicates will be rapidly closed, as will lower quality questions they are likely to ask. So please point out that they will have to read the FAQ and follow its advice.
    – Bart
    May 22, 2013 at 16:15
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    Just in case you're haven't see it, on Meta Stack Overflow, voting is often used to express agreement or disagreement, not to point out a lack of quality or helpfulness.
    – Bill the Lizard
    May 22, 2013 at 16:17
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    OK, I'll put that baseball bat away then :)
    – boisvert
    May 22, 2013 at 16:42
  • @Bart, actually, I'm considering sending students to SO, not to get course support, but precisely because the site standards teach good questioning, research etc. I even considered using SO reputation in the place of some marks, but that's just too easy to game - and besides, it's a tad unethical to crowdsource my marking.
    – boisvert
    May 22, 2013 at 21:25
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    @boisvert Fair enough. We've all seen our fair share of simultaneous zero effort coursework duplicates over here, so I'm just trying to prevent that. All students are welcome to ask good questions. But as said, we don't really need a tag for that. Now put the bat down please... ;)
    – Bart
    May 22, 2013 at 21:27

4 Answers 4

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To me it sounds too much like a meta-tag.

It does not describe the question, but describes who asked the question, and that is completely irrelevant to the said question.

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The description at the top of the tag page says:

A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions. Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question."

A school-specific tag does not seem to meet either criteria: People from your university could ask questions relating to any number of topics, and outsiders are not likely to try to find questions that originate only from your school.

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It would not be of benefit to the SE audience. A question that fits on Serverfault will not be improved by adding your university as a tag.

Why would I care what uni you are from if you ask a networking question. Is networking at generic.edu any different to networking at other.edu?

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Another thing to consider is that any user that has 500+ rep could easily edit this tag out of the question when they realize that it is not relevant to the subject at hand and then the whole purpose you had in creating the tag would be lost completely.

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