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I am mostly familiar with Worldbuilding.SE. There, we have a tag, hard-science, which is used by the askers that s/he expects answers to provide a certain amount of references and proofs to the claims made, and a minmum amount of information provided (namely more than usual).

I understand that the context is different, but the recent questions of FooBar, namely

is thought of as a series of educational questions, which could be refered to by new questions, or directly answers most typical question. A FAQ if you want.

But for that purpose it requires that the answers are a bit more thorough. Which leads me to my question:

Is there a way on Ec.SE to indicate that we are interested in having more exhaustive answers? Is there some "meta" tag similar to the hard-science?

And if not, is it desirable?

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Sort of. We have the academic-graduate tag, which is used on questions dealing with material that only arises at the postgraduate or professional research level (i.e. not basic undergraduate or layperson questions). The tag therefore signals the question's target audience, but implicit in this use is the idea that answers will conform to the appropriate degree of academic rigor.

This, though, seems to be slightly different to what you are asking, which seems to be more about the thoroughness and care with which answers are written regardless of the sophistication of the question. My view is that we should aspire for all answers to be appropriately supported by evidence or literature. Answers and questions that do meet this aspiration should be up-voted, and those that do not should be down-voted, put on hold (in the case of bad questions), or (in particularly egregious cases) deleted. As the site matures and questions of particular quality and general interest emerge, they can be administratively "protected", which prevents addition of spurious new content.

These are all mechanisms by which the community can drive the best content to the top. I think it would be a mistake and explicitly start labeling some content privileged as this would seem to imply that we think that less than thorough answers on non-tagged questions are somehow okay.


Edit: What I do think would be helpful is if we start to identify questions that are likely to be of very broad interest in the future and figure out a good way of curating such questions and ensuring they have some very high-quality up-voted answers.

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    $\begingroup$ I guess bounties are a standard way of curating such questions. $\endgroup$
    – FooBar
    Jul 22, 2015 at 16:06

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