Proposal to make the site more useful for experts (PhDs, academics, professionals)

Question

Problem Description

There aren't enough experts and expert-level questions on the site.

A long-standing criticism of this site is that there are too many non-expert level questions. This makes the site less appealing towards PhD students, academics, and professionals. There are some high level questions here and there, but you have to sift through a lot of lower quality questions to find them. Some others may not feel the same way, but I suspect that many PhD students and academics who are NOT currently regular users don't participate because of this. I suspect those many of those that are regular users begrudgingly accept it. Here are some previous meta posts that cite this problem:

• I think the problem this site has is a lack of experts
• We need more PHDs/Professionals on this site/why are we not getting them

The anecdote told in the second post is telling:

This week I actively approached a couple of professors and working economists I know and told them about the site. Most of them nodded their heads and said "yeah sure whenever I have time I'll check it out". One of them told me he heard of the site but was not impressed by the content to actively participate.

Past Attempts at a Solution

Here are a few solutions that I believe have been tried or proposed in the past, as indicated by relevant meta posts.

• Simply invite more experts to participate: How many experts did $you$ invite today?
• Start a separate site for experts only, like Math Overflow is to Math StackExchange: Who are PhDs and PhD candidates on this site?
• Create a separate tag for these expert questions (e.g. academic-graduate): Meta filter: Layman/Academic/Real World

I believe that these previous attempt have had a hard time succeeding for the following reasons. Inviting more experts is hard and experts are in relatively short supply relative to, say, undergraduates asking homework-style questions. A separate site for experts would be nice, but seems unlikely unless there is far more participation from experts on the site than there currently is. Maybe this would be viable in the future, but there needs to be a way to attract more experts now. Creating a separate tag for expert-level questions might work, but it takes more buy-in than we currently have. Furthermore, and this brings me to my point, adding a specific tag to these questions puts an additional burden on the person asking the question.

Proposal

Short description: Require that each question that isn't an "expert-level question" be tagged as a beginner question.

Detailed description: We should continue to strictly enforce the policy of closing off-topic questions, poorly crafted questions, and pure homework questions. We should also continue to invite experts, etc. I propose that we also institute a policy that every question that doesn't meet the standards of being considered an expert-level question MUST be tagged as beginner. We would need to decide on what is considered an expert-level question, which is admittedly subjective. However, as a rule of thumb, I would suggest that if it is the kind of question that a PhD student or higher would ask or encounter in a PhD-level class, then it counts. This includes questions about institutional details that might be important to PhD level research as well. Essentially, I would want to exclude questions that an undergraduate would ask or that a student would encounter in an undergraduate-level class.

Why I think this works:

• The previous solution of giving expert level questions their own tag put the burden of tagging questions on the author of the question. We want to make this site as friendly as possible towards experts, so the burden should be put on the writer of beginner-level questions.
• A question writer only gets 5 tags to apply to their question. This requirement automatically takes away one of them. This burden should be imposed on beginners.
• Furthermore, the site provides the ability to hide or "gray-out" questions that belong to a certain tag. You can also add certain tags to you "Watched Tags" list, but this only sends you notifications or emails. If all beginner-level questions were tagged as beginner questions, then you could hide or gray-out all of these questions on the home page. For example, the image below demonstrates what the home page will look like when I choose to gray out all questions tagged "macroeconomics". If I wanted, I could choose to hide them entirely:

• This is a low-stakes change to the site policy. It doesn't require us to all-of-the-sudden start closing a lot of questions (though we should likely adopt a more strict policy in this regard at some point). For now, all this requires is adding one simple label to each question. This can be done by any user easily by simply suggesting an edit to a question and it can be undone easily if it was mistakenly applied.

Do you agree?

I believe that adding these tags should be relatively easy to do. It's pretty easy to spot a beginner level question and suggest an edit. It's fairly easy to edit a question for the purposes of adding a tag. We don't necessarily need to update old questions to have this tag, as long as we are strict about requiring it on new questions. If we want, we can slowly update older questions over time.

There may be other solutions out there. Please offer solutions if you have any in the answers to this post below. I will post a copy-pasted excerpt from my above proposal as an answer below. Upvote it if you like my proposal. Suggest another solution or vote on other given answers if you like another solution better. Upvote this question if you believe that at least something needs to be done. Thanks!

Answer 1

Tag all beginner questions with beginner tag

My proposed solution, copy-and-pasted from the question.

Short description: Require that each question that isn't an "expert-level question" be tagged as a beginner question.

Detailed description: We should continue to strictly enforce the policy of closing off-topic questions, poorly crafted questions, and pure homework questions. We should also continue to invite experts, etc. I propose that we also institute a policy that every question that doesn't meet the standards of being considered an expert-level question MUST be tagged as beginner. We would need to decide on what is considered an expert-level question, which is admittedly subjective. However, as a rule of thumb, I would suggest that if it is the kind of question that a PhD student or higher would ask or encounter in a PhD-level class, then it counts. This includes questions about institutional details that might be important to PhD level research as well. Essentially, I would want to exclude questions that an undergraduate would ask or that a student would encounter in an undergraduate-level class.

Answer 2

Tag all beginner questions with nonexpert tag

Short description: Require that each question that isn't an "expert-level question" be tagged as a nonexpert question. Expert-level questions are the kind of questions that are more likely to be asked by PhDs/PhD-students in economics, academic economists, or research professionals in economics. Detailed guidelines are provided below to provide for a more objective-based classification.

Detailed description:

Guidelines: An "expert" question should contain ONE OR MORE the following properties.

1. Deals with a formal economic or econometric model. This includes questions about mathematical or statistical techniques.
2. Questions about computational implementation.
3. The question includes a reference to a peer-reviewed journal or a high-quality working paper series.
4. The question is about a data standard or data codebook, provided a link to the data codebook or data reference guide is provided. This does NOT include questions about a particular event in a data set. Such questions must satisfy one of the previous three criteria to be considered.

Commentary

• The criteria defining an expert-level question is seen as a set of guidelines. This may be modified in the future if it is too inflexible. As a rule of thumb, I would suggest that if it is the kind of question that a PhD student or higher would ask or encounter in a PhD-level class, then it counts.
• A question can still be an expert question without having any mathematical rigor as long as it references a research paper (peer-reviewed journal or high-quality working paper). This acts as a way to signal quality of a question. Remember, signals must be costly to be credible!
• The set of criteria defining an expert-level question is fairly objective, which should help to resolve concerns about meta-tags.
• We should continue to strictly enforce the policy of closing off-topic questions, poorly crafted questions, and pure homework questions. We should also continue to invite experts, etc. I propose that we also institute a policy that every question that doesn't meet the standards of being considered an expert-level question MUST be tagged as nonexpert.

Examples of Expert Questions

The following illustrate questions that satisfy one or more of the above criteria:

• This first question is an example of an expert question because it is a question about an econometric technique, satisfying criterion (1). It doesn't specifically reference a particular paper, but deals with a specific econometric technique. Bartik Instrument Intuition
• This is also an expert question under criterion (1). It doesn't include a reference to a specific peer-reviewed paper, but it is a question that mathematically describes an economic model. Optimal consumption in Merton-like portfolio choice model with constant wage
• This question satisfies (1) because deals with a mathematical technique. It doesn't include questions and doesn't outline a specific model. However, it does reference a mathematical concept. For this reason, it's an expert question. Note that it does include a reference to a textbook, but this book is NOT a peer-reviewed journal article as required by criterion (3). Intuition of the Kolmogorov Equations
• This question is an expert question because it concerns the computational implementation of an econometric model. It provides some example code and a description of what they are trying to accomplish. This qualifies under (2). Extract residuals from Uhlig's rejection method - Lag selection
• This question somewhat broad and does not include equations or a specific model. It's a somewhat "chatty" question. However, it does reference a specific result from a peer-reviewed paper. Admittedly, it could be improved by providing a reference to the specific paper---but it DOES include a link to the Wikipedia page about the specific set of papers.. This is an expert question under (3). The Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu results, what are the implications for macroeconomics?
• This question doesn't pertain to a specific model nor does it include a reference to a peer-reviewed journal article. However, the question regards interpreting a commonly used data set/data standard and it does includes a reference to the data guidebook. This qualifies as an expert question under (4). What's the difference (if any) between "fixed assets" and "fixed capital" in the UN SNA?

Acknowledgment: This proposal was formulated in conjunction with @1muflon1. It is a slight modification of the other proposal about the "beginner" tag.

Answer 3

I support the idea of using tagging as a low-stakes way to make the site more useful for experts. I wasn't previously aware of the facility for a user to have questions with selected tags greyed out or hidden altogether, but having tried it (it's on the right hand side of the site's home page) I find it's easy to use (and has improved my experience by hiding certain topics in which I am less interested).

In order to a) comply with the SE policy of discouraging meta-tags, and b) avoid a tag which could be taken to label the person asking a question and not the question itself, I propose adding two new tags elementary macroeconomics and elementary microeconomics. This follows precedent on Mathematics SE which has tags such as "elementary number theory" and "elementary set theory" which are heavily used and seem to work well. Those two tags might not cover all beginner-level questions, but they would cover a very high proportion, and others could be added later if necessary.

With up to 5 tags per question allowed, there would still be plenty of scope to indicate more precisely the topic of a question within the broad categories of macroeconomics and microeconomics.

Edit (in response to comment by @1muflon1).

My suggestions for descriptions for the tags are:

Elementary macroeconomics

For questions on topics commonly found in introductory or first degree courses in macroeconomics including GDP and its components, the determination of national income, the business cycle, inflation, the balance of payments, fiscal and monetary policy, and economic growth. Also questions about particular countries or real world situations to which such topics are relevant.

Elementary microeconomics

For questions on topics commonly found in introductory or first degree courses in microeconomics including consumer and firm behaviour, supply and demand, market structures, international trade, welfare, market failure and policy responses. Also questions about particular markets or real world situations to which such topics are relevant.

These are just a first stab: I'm sure others will have improvements.

Answer 4

I like the idea, and it seem to be well received on the net basis, so I think we should move forward in this direction, but at the same time it needs some modifying.

For better or worse, current policy of SE is to explicitly discourage meta tags.

From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged.

How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

My Proposed Alternative

My proposal would be to have tag:

nonacademic

With the following tag description:

For questions that are not about formal economic or econometric models and techniques, their implementations using programs and languages or do not include references to, or are not based on academic sources.

(by the way suggestions to improve the tag description above are welcome).

Advantage of this tag are in my opinion following:

1. The tag is fairly objective, it has clear unambiguous criteria for what is nonacademic question.
2. The tag has less negative connotation, beginner could be considered offensive by someone who takes the tag personally. While, I think most people would be reasonable enough not to take offense it is better for us to cover all bases.
3. I do not believe the tag would qualify as meta-tag. The tag can stand on its own in the same way as a self-study/homework question tags can. Self-study/homework question tags are common across science stack exchanges. The nonacademic tag is informative about the fact that the question contains nonacademic content, in same way as self-study/homework tag is informative about the fact that question contains homework exercises, even if further tags should be used to clarify nature of that nonacademic content.
4. I think it is fully in line with the spirit of the proposal here. The tag effectively applies to any laymen question. It might not apply to beginner level science questions, but those usually fall under self-study, and we can simply start to enforce the self-study tag as well. This is actually already being done on other science stacks such as Physics.se where their homework and exercises tag is more strictly enforced.

Alternatively, we could have tag:

nonexpert

with the same description:

For questions that are not about formal economic or econometric models and techniques, their implementations using programs and languages or do not include references to, or are not based on academic sources.

Per suggestions this might be better as word academic can suggest that it has something to do with workings of academia.

PS: In comments there was complaint that Non-expert is hyphenated, nonacademic does not suffer from that issue :) (Apparently, nonexpert is not hyphenated as well).

---

After discussions between mods and also @jmbejara and other community members the nonexpert was now added.

Answer 5

Disclaimer - I'm only a casual user of this site and no economist.

My recommendation is to do nothing.

As someone with an interest in economics, but no formal education, it's really helpful that a forum like this exists. While I can read up on things online, it can be hard to know the right search terms, or to piece multiple sources together when no single source directly answers the question. It seems that some experts are willing to answer beginner questions, and I feel we'd lose this if the site was segregated by a "beginner" tag. This works both ways - some of my answers have been well received, suggesting there's merit a in layman's answer that strikes a different tone to a formalised academic one.