Forum:What Is A Bioinformatics Question? On Which Criteria Should Questions Be Closed Or Deleted?

Question

[Leonor Palmeira]

Closing questions, deleting questions is not a trivial matter, and now and then, small discussions re-emerge on this topic. I believe that an open discussion on this could be beneficial to find a consensual behaviour that would suit us:

To make this discussion productive, could you try answering the following questions:

• which questions do you believe belong to Biostars?
• which questions do you believe should be posted on other sites?
• what criteria would you use to close a question? a 'closed' question does not allow for new 'answers', but can still be commented.
• what criteria would you use to delete a question? the content of a 'deleted' question becomes invisible, but the title/comments/answers are still visible.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

This is not an easy question to answer and in the end the decisions will come down to everyone's individual judgement.

In my opinion appropriate questions should have a scientific component. But since bioinformatics also implies running tools from command line the separation between scientific content and a simple programming question or a system administration task may be less obvious.

Being too strict with the rules however can also have a detrimental effect, it could make for a less enjoyable environment.

• In general I try to err on the side of caution and only close/delete questions that obviously and blatantly violate the rules.
• I don't like to close questions unless the discussion and followups degenerate into a flamewar (which has not happened up to this point). Other people disagree, the main problem with closing is that prevents anyone other than moderators to possibly improve on the post or to add a potentially good answer.
• I would only delete questions that are obvious spam or clearly off topic: i.e. Biostar as a motherboard brand

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

Another related usability issue is that a deleted question should remain visible to the author - right now that is not the case unless the author has moderation rights.