Forum:Users of 0 rep required to read etiquette guides before first post?

Question

[John]

Everyday, there are 1 or 2 questions along the lines of "please help me bioinformatics my data", "what is the best pipeline for my analysis?" or "samtools didn't work - what should I do?". Almost always, this comes from 0 rep users who just joined the site.

Perhaps if there was a technical measure to ensure that if you have <100 rep and you want to make a new question, you have to read an etiquette reminder first. Although I really like these three examples, I think perhaps they are little verbose for an intervention-style popup. Perhaps something more along the lines of a simple reminder to:

1. Explain your goal
2. Explain your data
3. Show what you have tried so far (if applicable)
4. Paste the error message (if applicable)

In the aforementioned situations, i'm often unsure if the new user is unaware of how to ask a good question, or simply too lazy.

If it's the first type, I really don't want to delete their question because I'd like Biostars to feel inclusive. If it's the latter, then deleting is appropriate.

I think a popup or something with some simple pointers would be really helpful in identifying users who are trying.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

One of the important skills we have to develop as bioinformaticians is that of empathy and how to communicate with people from radically different backgrounds.

As it happens this is quite unique to bioinformatics - there is no other scientific field where people from the outside would need to know the details of how that field works. We need to embrace this reality and find ways to solve these issues with positive actions - that's how we get ahead. Get really good at dealing gracefully with seemingly "dumb" questions here and what you'll find that your career takes off - you'll become really good at dealing with people in general.

Any limitation that seems simple and straightforward and makes sense for someone that understand the domain will just as easily be perceived very negatively and as elitist by the recipient of it. Commenting, advising, editing and fixing up the title or content of posts is welcome but moderation (closing and deleting) and putting on limits of various kinds (users see these as punishments or putdowns) should be reserved strictly to unambiguously inappropriate posts.

[Ram]

I agree with the "you'll learn to deal with it gracefully" part. It is especially effective because people are more willing to listen and adapt when you're guiding them instead of yelling at them.

What I think we need is an outlet for mods to let off steam. I think that part is becoming a little too explosive of late.

[Istvan Albert]

we need like a "meta" channel, that filters for some type of discussions that otherwise do not show by default on the main page

Answer 2

[piet]

I would clearly vote against such procedures for new users. In praxis nobody will care about it, as you do when you sign a license agreement upon installing a program on Windows. But it has a habit of elitism.

Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field which requires knowledge from very different domains. You can only learn if you are allowed and welcome to ask questions.

I appreciate if on a case by case basis moderators or other experienced users give critical comments, especially for carelessly written postings.

[Ram]

John raises his point because there have been a LOT of such posts recently. This is the exact reason why I am working on these posts: biostars.org/t/how-to/

[John]

I think i've been misunderstood - licence agreements are long and full of complex language. I'm not talking about anything longer than 3 or 4 short sentences saying "don't forget to xyz, otherwise we can't help you".

I don't think it would be appropriate to pick a few select examples from the past week, but some questions simply cannot be answered without details of what the error was, or a snippit of the data they are using. The worst, however, is when a question is answered, sometimes with bespoke code, only to find out later that the question is based on a faulty assumption or previous step. Typically because the user's goal can be achieved using some other method unrelated to the user's question. Several awk/grep questions come to mind, where the "solution" provided is a regex, to work around something that shouldn't have happened in an earlier, unmentioned, step.

But please don't think i'm being elitist - i'm not looking for more rules to impose on people! I'm trying to see less closed questions :) (and for the record, i've never ever moderated anyone else's anything)

[piet]

I agree, that currently the amount of questions with deficits, being impolite, lacking a clear description of the problem is high. Maybe several of them remain unanswered and fall off the shelf after a few days.

But this also reflects the tremendous success of sequencing bases methods in biology, medical diagnostics, archaeology, and the ever growing number of installed instruments all over the world even in developing or non-English speaking countries.

Answer 3

[Anima Mundi]

If I can add my personal note, I appreciate what piet and Istvan wrote. My feeling is that the community improved a lot in the last five years in the way people are guided and welcomed. To my eyes, this is just as important as providing good scientific advice.

Answer 4

[Michael]

Let me chime in with my little rant here. I get the different point of views, and I also know it's easy to become irate by some lazy posts. You might know me as the one... Whatever, I don't agree fully that showing a posting guide to users or new users is elitist. I think there is definitely the need for more clear guidance on posting and asking questions. Currently there is zero guidance, at least on the "ask a question page", and being considerate, polite, showing empathy are all fine and good traits, but that doesn't mean we can't improve the site. I know, you guys have written the '10 useful hints guide for getting help.....', but why is it not linked on the site?

Such improvements would indeed benefit new users most, otherwise it is hard to complain about users not searching in advance, and giving too little information. Look at SE https://drupal.stackexchange.com/help as an example. Also compare https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask and https://www.biostars.org/p/new/post/ both minimalistic but there is one important difference. The SE site has a box on how to ask a question with a link and the biostars site has not.

Ram's initiative is also a move into the right direction. This content should be accessible from the ask a question page.

A major advantage of having some documentation: the "told you so" effect, at least users could have gotten the information easily, if they wanted; having something to link something makes it much easier for the mods. Now, we have to explain almost each and every time, how to report a problem properly. I mean, I totally get it that a biologist who is new to bioinformatics does not immediately know what is relevant information to describe a problem. And that is totally fine and in order. You need to have developed software, debugged or written code, and analyzed a lot of data to get a feeling for this. Still, it would be very helpful to have some document, stating, "yes, it is relevant what operating system, sequencing machine, exact error message, etc." you are dealing with.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't use SE as a role-model for everything on Biostars, the community there is certainly hostile sometimes (does it have something to say that even I perceive it like this;), and they are much more restrictive with what you can post over there, e.g. anything that even remotely smells like a bug report would get closed.

Another set back is that the search on Biostars is not that good imo, it is often easier to use google restricted to biostars.

[Istvan Albert]

I am not against linking and displaying help links - the only thing I am against is requiring that someone do this or that.

Now putting links on the new post page always felt to me as being too late to educate a user. At this point the user has committed to asking a question, their minds are now working in a different mode, this is not the time when people are receptive to suggestions to leave and read another page.

The conundrum is that posts like the ones Ram has created should be visible for a new users, on the other hand regular users probably wouldn't want to look at these all the time, they just use up the most valuable estate of the site. So making them a sticky post is not a good course of action. We do actually have a sticky post attribute built in the system but has never been enabled directly.

Things that we could do is list the "how-to" posts for new users as if these were "sticky" but not for the rest of the users. This will require some engineering.

The challenges we are dealing with are quite common for all website not just ours, the term is "user onboarding" you can find discussions and guides for it.

[John]

Yes, one of the things i love about Biostars and hate about SE is that opinion-based questions are not allowed on SE in any context what-so-ever, where as it's such a nice and close-nit community here (and things move so fast) that I feel that opinion-based questions are typically quite valuable. Also the lack of a down-voting was, in my opinion, genius :)

[Istvan Albert]

There were a lot of discussions about down-votes. The site used to have them, most people said that they wanted them but then time and again the real data pointed towards down-votes being used as a way to take sides when a disagreement is voiced. Even after knowing that I myself occasionally used them that that way. And that is really not what they are supposed to mean. Better not have them at all.

[piet]

Yes, when I first read this thread yesterday, I was missing an opportunity for down-voting. But then I recognized that you have to write an answer to express your diverging opinion, and that this answer may eventually collect consenting votes from others. And that's a nice way to structure a discussion.

[Michael]

Thanx, fixed that :)

Btw, it'n not only opinion based question, it is seemingly also anything that looks like "I have this terrible error, how could I even find out what it is, any hint", https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/190371/how-to-restore-private-file-structure-after-major-version-update

In all honesty I would never have expected this to be closed.

Having to taste my own medicine is funny sometimes :P

[Istvan Albert]

yes, this is the main concern I have with SE, the rules (or the interpretations) are IMO way too strict, it is not clear how and why this evolved this way, or whether it is a direct consequence of the community rules

See also this The decline of Stack Overflow