3
$\begingroup$

I see a lot of question tagged with "bio-informatics" and as far as I know there are always comments like:

This is probably a better question for biostars.org

Just like this recent question. I'm wondering if these question are really off-topic and if this is the case why is there a bio-informatics tag? This may be quite misleading for new (or even experienced) people on this site, because this implicitly suggests that bio-informatics question are allowed.

$\endgroup$
1
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Bioinformatics questions aren't off-topic here, and I haven't seen anyone say otherwise. I think people recommend biostars because they are more likely to get an answer there. For all we know, people who leave those comments are biostar employees! $\endgroup$
    – canadianer
    Feb 22 '17 at 1:33
3
$\begingroup$

I agree that it can be a bit confusing, but I think the problem is that many people come here with questions about how to do bioinformatics, rather than how to relate bioinformatics results back to biology. The former is off-topic, the latter is not. I'm not sure if the issue can be resolved, because the tag is still appropriate when the question is on-topic.

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3544/why-is-there-a-bio-informatics-tag
biology.meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-43
135667
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MNWA2RQ3C7XMUDYFHSEMAFMJAIELJKBS
<urn:uuid:506a6daa-6f12-4c6e-a710-6c73753f8cbb>
2021-10-26T02:51:06Z
151.101.129.69
text/html
sha1:EDJM7FA23QIMSX5POKULJ7ON44AB6YSU
<urn:uuid:19b6331e-1b92-4c5f-8dbe-e1301f19117f>
https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3544/why-is-there-a-bio-informatics-tag
response
<urn:uuid:b0dab34f-8d9b-4409-aaf9-320dc5008798>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-13
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/