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Should the tags dna-sequencing and genome-sequencing be listed as synonyms? On one hand, genome sequencing is only one of several applications of DNA sequencing technologies. On the other hand, with the rapidly decreasing cost of high-throughput sequencing platforms, sequencing DNA at the genome scale has become commonplace and seems to be overtaking other sequencing applications that may have been more prevalent in the past. Are these distinctions clear enough to separate the tags?

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I created the synonym as the tag was used for DNA sequencing that was not genomes. There is obviously a difference between those two, but I don't think it makes sense for us to apply that distinction in tags.

At the moment we have 10 questions with that tag, if we split it up further we'll get even smaller tags that are less useful. If we had hundreds of questions on this topic, it might make sense to divide the tag, or supplement it with more specific tags.

We should strive to create useful tags, they need to have a certain size to be useful. A very specific tag with only a handful of questions will likely not be favorited by anyone, it's not very useful. On the other side, a broad tag that comprises a large part of all the questions on the site would also be pretty useless.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think this is a good idea. We could even go one step further and simplify it by making dna- and genome-sequencing synonymous with "sequencing" so that way the tags are very clear. $\endgroup$
    – user560
    Commented Mar 26, 2012 at 21:22
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    $\begingroup$ @leonardo As long as nobody creates the sequencing tag, we don't need to (most people will just pick what autocomplete shows them, which will be dna-sequencing). If someone does, I'd agree that we should synonymize it. $\endgroup$
    – Mad Scientist Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2012 at 21:25
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    $\begingroup$ @leonardo there is also protein sequencing, so I'd rather avoid the simple "sequencing" tag. $\endgroup$
    – Aleadam
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 21:53
  • $\begingroup$ That's true. We could synonomize the two tags with genetic-sequencing to make it clear it references nucleotides and is separate from protein. $\endgroup$
    – user560
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 21:57

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