Are locale or time-dependent questions acceptable? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Too localized: by population size instead of geographical area

Should questions that depend on a specific location (continent, country, city) or time (anything that changes rapidly over time) be allowed? I'm specifically referring to questions about how much to charge or what a job market looks like.

Answer 1

I would vote to allow such questions.

I would argue that the fact that posts have dates on them leave the post up to the discretion of the reader.

The fact that StackExchange sites are designed for quick answers means that questions will be answered in a timely fashion. As such, there will not be open ended $$ questions. Users use SO with judgement. It's either current or not.

The same thing is with tech. Let's shut down SO because tech changes a few time s a year with Apple and faster/slower depending where you go.

EDIT:

Perhaps we should make a new site called SiliconValue.se specifically for project price haggling?

Answer 2

I was originally okay with it, but in the first hour of beta, there are three mostly-identical questions that deal with different locales:

• Hourly Billing or per project? Rates in the US?
• Best country for getting a job
• Programmer's salary in UK

Unchecked, this could consume the site. I think these types of questions should be closed as too localized.

Answer 3

I say no. I don't think any specific questions that depend on geographic location (country, state, city) or time should be allowed. We should try to capture things that are long-lasting and relevant to programmers everywhere. However, if someone is asking for a resource that helps them obtain geographic or time-specific information (such as asking for a website that regularly tracks salaries of programmers in country X), that should be acceptable.

I realize that some things will become irrelevant over the course of time, but specifically, things like the current job market and wages/rates change far too rapidly, IMO, to be of use here.

Answer 4

I'm conflicted. I see a few points to this:

• Some interesting and worthy questions may require local context (eg, "What's the average salary" is less useful than "What's the average salary in the UK?)
• Some similar questions would be clearly useless for too small of a Geographical area ("what's the average salary in the town of Warwick in Orange County, NY)
• The above two points would put us in the hairy position of deciding what constitutes "too small" (is Sri Lanka too small? Latvia? Italy? France?)

Given that, I think it'd be better to avoid geographically local questions entirely, at the cost of whatever small amount of good discussion might have been had.