Proposal: Bioinformatics
We already have Biostars. This will just fragment the community. What purpose would this site serve that Biostars or Seqanswers doesn't?
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2My feeling is that the community is already fragmented. I almost never use biostars or seqanswers, because I got used to stackexchange before knowing about these sites. That's not a very good reason for me not to try them, but the fact is that I read and post bioinformatics questions more often in stackoverflow than in biostars or seqanswers.– bliCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 13:42
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Biostar SE do not exists anymore.– user162274Commented May 18, 2017 at 13:49
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4 Answers
This will just fragment the community.
Very correct, and this is an important consideration.
That said, people have many, many issues with BioStars. I’ve personally put my view into words on Reddit:
… the [BioStars] software really sucks compared to Stack Exchange. I really dislike using it. Busy layout, chaotic comments, all leading to incredibly hard to find information.
— An opinion widely shared by others. Others have added their own arguments.
And let’s not forget that from the very beginning there was a very strong minority (actually, it was probably a majority!) within the BioStars community that felt that the platform should have moved to Stack Exchange.
And this was before Stack Exchange had established itself as the uncontested champion of Q&A websites. In particular in terms of software development, Stack Exchange has made giant leaps since then. BioStars simply cannot compete, and gets left behind in terms of usability. The importance of this cannot be overstated: BioStars’ lack of usability prevents me from effectively finding solutions to my problems, and from contributing my own knowledge. And I know that this is also true for others.
To answer your specific question:
What purpose would this site serve that Biostars or Seqanswers doesn't?
- It would make bioinformatics expertise vastly more easily findable and accessible.
- It would lower the barrier of entry for new people to contribute their expertise.
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Assuming this gets out of beta, would it be possible to try and transfer biostars users/data whole-sale to the stackexchange backend rather than maintain two separate communities?– OptCommented Apr 20, 2017 at 17:22
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2Biostars originally used the SE v1 platform. It would have been possible to migrate users + data to SE v2 and that was discussed at the time. The site owner objected to the SE v2 licensing terms, so developed their own platform. Therefore migration is unlikely a viable option.– neilfwsCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 1:06
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1@neilfws SE2 can dump a whole site to XMLs, e.g. when it closes a beta site. I guess it may import the dump as well. If so, technically, it should be possible to migrate most biostar contents, except hierarchical comments and non-questions. Practically, however, there are lots of policy issues. I don't see migration happening, either.– medbeCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 2:55
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But Biostars is not built on SE (it's a Django-based app) and does not, so far as I know, have an XML dump. So any dump from Biostars would have to be converted somehow to SE XML.– neilfwsCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 3:42
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5Technically, it is possible to convert dumps in other formats to SE XML. We are experts in format conversion, aren't we ;-)– medbeCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 4:11
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We can import questions with [bioinformatics] tag in Stackoverflow and Biology SE.– prab4thCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 10:25
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Realistically I don’t think the transfer of data is going to happen. It might have been an option years ago. I doubt it will be now. Not only is the format different (e.g. BioStars has nested comments, SE doesn’t), there’s also the question of account conversion etc. Commented Apr 21, 2017 at 11:50
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1But we can tap into Biology, StackOverflow and CrossValidated right?– prab4thCommented Apr 21, 2017 at 18:47
I hear this "fragment the community" argument a lot and I'm not convinced that it is true. I see the Web as one resource. I type a question into Google, it returns results. If the best results seem to come from Biostars, I go there. If they come from Seqanswers, I go there. If I choose to ask a question, there are sufficient users at both sites that I'm likely to get an answer. If any one site is insufficiently active or useful, people will migrate elsewhere anyway. I guess my conclusion is that competition is good.
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1I completely agree. Indeed, it seems that most SE users committing here follow more than one site -- we don't need to abandon biostars to contribute to Bioinformatics SE. A possible argument for fragmentation is that actively contributing to a Q&A site demands much effort, and therefore biggest contributors would end up quitting one of them. Which (1) if true, would be more an opportunity (e.g. to newcomers) than a problem, since in the end (as you mention) both will be available; and (2) as I observed above, "power users" already contribute to several platforms all the time. Commented Apr 21, 2017 at 9:08
Personal opinion:
I got a lot of useful answers from stats.stackexchange, I like the way it is organized. It is well-controlled by the admins, questions that are not clear or off-topic usually become closed in less than half of an hour (and the authors of such questions have to re-formulate them or make appropriate tags). Biostars is quite messy.
I like Seqanswers, it is more useful than Biostars. But it suffers from the same problems (less than biostars, but still).
It is a very nice option to migrate questions from one stackexchange site to another.
I hope that there will be a way to organise things better using this platform. If we will make a proper set of tags and control the match between tags and actual questions, if we will be able to create a proper wiki from FAQs, if admins will work hard on this - this Q&A web site will be as useful as stats.stackexchange or stack overflow.
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2Wow, you must be the first person I’ve heard who prefers Seqanswers to Biostars. ;-) Commented Apr 21, 2017 at 11:53
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I also prefer Seqanswers to Biostars. I like that the authors of bioinformatics programs that I use participate in discussions, and that it feels like the community is there to help everyone, rather than just those with highly technical and specific problems. However, I haven't really used Biostars. My main exposure to it is the occasional passive aggressive "Cross post Biostars" comment on SeqAnswers (which never seems to have any better answers on the BioStars version), and an impression of generally pretentious posts.– gringerCommented Apr 25, 2017 at 3:35
Firstly, I believe BioStar is just bad and rubbish. Whoever wrote the site should lose the job. Bioinformaticians deserve something better, and this is why we need one here.
I've been actively participating Bioinformatics questions on biology.exchange, but it's not a perfect solution. I'm happy to commit for a bioinformatics-only site.
There is no such thing as "fragment the community" because all the bioinformaticians will just come here. The two sites (BioStar and seqanswers) will fade away like Yahoo Ask!.
