All Questions
27
questions
26
votes
4
answers
881
views
Is there a large enough community to sustain this site?
Update:
This site has passed the final evaluation! Barring any technical delays, Bioinformatics SE should go public sometime this week.
Great work everyone!
(original post)
Spread the word. In less ...
- 100
18
votes
0
answers
107
views
Let’s standardise some tags
Let’s standardise some tags.
For instance, there are already two competing conventions at work:
rna-seq
scrnaseq
Either both should use a dash, or none should.
I propose the slightly more readable ...
- 4,845
15
votes
3
answers
249
views
Please refrain from closing proper but imperfect questions so quickly
I have been thinking about this for a while. This recently on-hold question really touches my nerve. The question is put on hold due to being too "broad". I will use it as an example to explain my ...
- 6,485
14
votes
2
answers
193
views
Should we allow questions about biology?
How do we feel about questions about biological principles that can be confusing to a bioinformatician with no background in biology? While purely biological questions should, I think, be off topic ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
7
votes
3
answers
190
views
Interacting with other Q&A communities
When the proposal of Bioinformatics started there was a discussion in Biostars about the this site (and SE in general compared to Biostars). Some of the points raised are:
Unfriendly community, ...
- 4,693
22
votes
8
answers
664
views
Accepting Nominations — Who should moderate this site? [duplicate]
Ideally, Moderators♦ are elected by the community, but until the community is large enough to hold a proper election, we will be appointing three provisional Moderators to fill those roles.
We need ...
- 100
21
votes
3
answers
231
views
What sort of questions are appropriate for Bioinformatics SE?
I have spent a lot of time on StackOverflow and am pretty familiar with the types of questions that are and are not allowed on the site. I am a little unsure as to how well the strict question rules ...
- 429
14
votes
0
answers
178
views
Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
- 101
14
votes
3
answers
157
views
How do we feel about questions that are essentially about text parsing?
A lot of the daily tasks of a bioinformatician can be boiled down to simple text parsing. Yes, we will be dealing with text files containing some form of biological data, but the answer might not ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
11
votes
2
answers
168
views
Computational biology but not gene sequences?
I see that this site is focused on sequencing and genomics. I'm wondering if other fields that combine computations and biology are on-topic. Such as:
molecular dynamics simulations,
analyzing 3d ...
- 1,261
10
votes
2
answers
164
views
Moderators: Please do not close questions just because they are old
I just had an old question of mine closed by a moderator with the following comment:
I’m voting to close this question because it was asked a long time ago, and it is likely that an answer is no ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
10
votes
3
answers
139
views
Serving as a "support forum" for specific tools
One of the nice features of biostars is that the site is open to people using it as a forum for supporting their own tools (i.e., as a replacement for a tool-specific email list). The tool authors ...
- 19.6k
8
votes
3
answers
139
views
Migrating bioinformatics questions from other SE sites
There are a host of Bioinformatics questions on StackOverflow, CrossValidated, and probably other SE sites as well.
Many of these questions would now be better placed here than on the site they were ...
- 2,133
7
votes
0
answers
61
views
2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in ...
- 101
7
votes
2
answers
445
views
Please stop cross posting behavior
Please stop cross posting behavior from biostars.org, where new questions are immediately transferred to this site. If you think you need this to boost your question count over the required threshold, ...
- 173
7
votes
1
answer
134
views
Is it okay to ask questions regarding being a bioinformatician?
I was wondering if the Bioinformatics SE is a good place to post questions relating to the process of research in bioinformatics.
Example:
What is the proper way to format a PK/PD model for a ...
6
votes
3
answers
88
views
Deleting comments before the question is answered
I received an email stating I have unread items in SE inbox. When I clicked on the link, the comments had already been deleted. I remember having a discussion with the OP in the comment section not ...
- 2,086
6
votes
2
answers
125
views
Closing because a question is cross posted?
A question has been closed as off-topic, and the moderator who closed said in a comment:
This is already receiving sufficient attention on biostars. Giving it further attention here would be a waste ...
- 4,693
6
votes
1
answer
53
views
Make tags [mapping] and [read mapping] synonyms
The topic of read mapping is a sufficiently distinct subset of the more general class of sequence alignment topics to warrant a dedicated tag. However, we should collapse ...
- 5,060
5
votes
5
answers
118
views
Make tags [sam] and [bam] synonyms
SAM and BAM are effectively plain-text and binary representations of the same alignment format. I'd argue these terms should be synonyms.
UPDATE: It doesn't look like we've reached a consensus, but I ...
- 5,060
5
votes
3
answers
190
views
[alignment], [sequence-alignment], [read-alignment] and [msa] tags
Let's decide here on the status for different tags related to alignment.
There are two groups of questions.
One is related to pairwise and multiple sequence alignments and algorithms. This field is ...
- 2,725
5
votes
0
answers
90
views
Proposing new tag for the Bioinformatics channel
I am a synthetic biologist working heavily on the modeling of genetic circuits and the development of software for bioinformatics. Many researchers and software developers within bioinformatics rely ...
5
votes
0
answers
71
views
Announcing a “Graduation” election for 2022
Summary: Bioinformatics Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for an election on September 19th, 2022, as your “graduation” election!
The timeline:
On September 12, 2022, I'll post a ...
- 101
4
votes
1
answer
92
views
Would this be a good community for SBOL Q&A?
The Synthetic Biology Open Language is an open representational standard for encoding biological designs. As this community has been growing, it has been trying to figure out a better way than FAQs to ...
- 653
4
votes
0
answers
54
views
Announcing a Pro Tempore election
Summary: Bioinformatics Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on April 12 to bring in two more moderators.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta ...
- 101
2
votes
0
answers
53
views
2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, ...
- 101
-1
votes
1
answer
47
views
Replace sam and bam tags with a single sam-or-bam tag
The discussion in the recent suggestion to make sam and bam synonyms seems inconclusive with users falling on either side of the argument.
I propose we instead remove both tags and create sam-or-bam,...
terdonMod
- 9,662