Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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2015 Community Moderator Election Results
Biology's 1st moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 3 new moderators are:
They've replaced the pro tempore crew — please thank both teams for volunteering, ...
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Not all questions featuring something biological are biology questions
Something I think we need to clear up in terms of what is and is not on-topic, are questions where the user asks something that is not a biological question and then attempting to justify it being ...
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2017 Community Moderator Election Results
Biology's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and ...
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Comment templates to provide to new users or users who need a reminder
This post inspired to start a comment template thread for Bio. Many SE sites make use of type of thread to added new and experienced users alike to provide clear, constructive comments to users who ...
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Reminder: questions about biological mechanisms behind medical conditions are explicitly on topic here
Every once in a while there are some close votes of human biology questions that are explicitly on topic here. It came up again today here. Not the best question, I'll admit, but it shouldn't be ...
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Election of a new moderator
I will be stepping down as a moderator soon and have requested the community team to initiate an election for the post. It was really a wonderful experience for me, but I guess I am not able to find ...
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2015 Community Moderator Election
The 2015 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks,...
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Do site statistics still matter after graduation?- Revamp
I was am still wondering whether the much-pursued site statistics are still relevant now we are graduated?
For example, I have been answering quite a few oldies just now (2013, 2014 29 revival ...
AliceDMod
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Earth Day 2021: thinking about our planet, biology, and sustainability
Earth Day is celebrated this week on April 22nd. The day was created to bring focus to learning about environmental issues and more broadly to discuss the issues faced by any life sharing this planet, ...
Bryan KrauseMod
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Superscript / Subscript buttons
This is just technical and mainly for the site developers. $\TeX$ does take up some resource I believe, and its usage should be limited to only those places where it is really necessary. Most of the ...
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Does there exist a substantial guide for how to write questions on biology.SE?
We can find that people ask if a specific topic is "on topic", and how they can improve their question. There are of course the children sites of help center, and a small list of general rules have ...
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2019 Community Moderator Election
The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks,...
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Is it OK to ask if a recorded sound was emitted by a bat?
Note: the question is now posted on Biology.SE.
For fun, I tried to record sounds emitted by bats in an area where bats were flying all around.
By doing a few manipulations with the audio record (...
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Proposal to split and retitle the community question on good and bad traits
Background
In 2016 a Meta post discussed the problem of questions “that ask for why evolution did not lead to situation-X”. It was suggested that a community wiki question be created, and provided ...
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Please (no longer) downvote this post
Well, not this post, but rather this post.
It was created to promote the recent moderator election. Now that the election is over we don't want to see the ad anymore. However, so that it may be ...
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Does it make sense to re-open a question and immediately re-close it to mark it as duplicate?
This question was fueled by below linked question. The idea behind this question, namely re-opening poorly posed closed questions and mark them as dupe instead, may be important as a general issue, ...
AliceDMod
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Is finding a common denominator of expert-level and popular-sciene questions necessary and crucial for a healthy experimental science SE site?
Some stackexchange science proposals are getting closed soon. Often on those sites a discusson/conflict between experts/students/laymen arises, what type of questions are off-topic or drive away ...
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2021: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in ...
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How different should a biology-related SE proposal be?
I was recently alerted to the existence of a "History of science and mathematics" SE (currently in beta). I think I'm missing something about SE creation - why has this entered beta? It seems to fail ...
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2017 Community Moderator Election
The 2017 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks,...
6
votes
0
answers
211
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Is "Stackoverflow modding itself out of existence"?
The title belongs to a blog post is trending today on Hacker News. Thousands of people are looking at it as I write this.
I often feel that biology.se is destined to be a minor player compared to ...
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Junk-DNA Tag proposal
Quoting @hippietrail
Would anyone like to add junk-dna and/or noncoding-dna (or should that
be non-coding-dna tags? I barely have enough rep here to breathe (-:
I would like to have a tag of ...
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2022: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
- 100
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Can we do something about the one-line "interesting" questions?
I have noticed that well-sourced and good questions get fewer votes compared to some "interesting" ones. For example, a one-liner question gets ~300 votes (the maximum number of upvotes for ...
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User comments on my username, starting off-topic discussion - flag declined
I disagreed with a comment suggesting an edit, and received a rather weird response:
@TomášZato-ReinstateMonica It is not standard English. My arguments are clear. You make the site accessible to ...
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CogSci has changed its name
As of yesterday, Cognitive Sciences has been renamed into
Psychology & Neuroscience
There are various reasons for this. The most important reasons, imo, being that we wish to attract more ...
AliceDMod
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Visual dynamic range question mod-closed - why?
I just wished to bring up this question - I didn't write it, I didn't answer it, but I think it's a valid question - How are colors outside the standard RGB color scheme perceived?.
If it was ...
AliceDMod
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Add a clear statement on references in the "How do I write a good answer?"
At the moment there isn't a clear statement on the help page "How do I write a good answer?" saying that answers should preferably include references to back them up. For "good answers" I would say ...
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Tag Wiki Excerpts
...the first two pages of tags should have excellent tag wiki excerpts at a minimum. If they have great, complete tag wikis, that’s even better, but you have to crawl before you can walk.
We need your ...
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New bioacoustics SE site may be of interest to you
The Bioacoustics Stack Exchange has reached the Beta stage and is LIVE! It is also in a critical stage, and we need your help to keep it alive. It is related to the Biology SE, but really different ...
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2020: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network ...
- 100
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Help developing question about fishing and the carbon cycle
I have been reading about medieval fishing, and how it was so widespread they had to institute the first laws limiting how many fish could be taken. This got me thinking about the Pacific Northwest. ...
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Tidying up questions in a particular subject area
This question is directed mainly at the mods, but, of course anyone can express an opinion.
Because of the work of our phantom editor, a number of old questions recently re-emerged, some of which ...
- 26.3k
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Are medical terminology definitions considered off-topic?
This is the post in question. It's the first that I've seen a post of this kind since I've been active on Biology.SE, and I'm wondering: if the OP literally only asks for the meaning/origin of a ...
user22020
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Creating tags for taxonomy ranks?
Since this forum is welcoming ecologist (Do we accept the ecology community?) I suppose that a number of questions regarding the species or taxonomy rank will increase.
It is creating specialsed ...
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Self help question
The question "What exactly is neuroplasticity, and can it be demonstrated with a simple experiment?" was closed because of off-topicness due to self-help. The only reference to a do-it-yourself was ...
AliceDMod
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Are click-bait question titles unacceptable?
Why is my son not an enormous wart?, whilst less precise and academic than:
Why don't warts caused by HPV spread to the whole body?
Why does a wart not spread laterally?
I don't think it's ...
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How should the first clause of a tag wiki be formatted?
There are a lot of tag wikis that start with some variation on "The study of / a discipline that", "Questions related to / questions about", or "[tag] refers to / deals with / is /". It seems to me ...
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To Answer, or not to answer (that is, the Question without research)
When I first joined this site, we didn't require prior research in questions. It was more fun. It felt inviting (ugh!) and encouraging of learning about the magnificence that is Biology.
Sometime ...
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How to tag questions about animals or other living things surviving being frozen for a long time? Is a new tag needed or just adjust cryonics tag?
Has the 2018 report of nematodes frozen for 30 to 40,000 years been confirmed? Has 14C dating confirmed their age? asks about a July 2018 paper in Doklady Biological Sciences Viable Nematodes from ...
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Where do public policy questions related to biology go?
Background
I asked this question on biology stack exchange to get the scientific reason behind Massachusetts' reopening policy of requiring masks even with a vaccine.
I thought I made sense to ask ...
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Handling "noisy" edit summaries in the "Suggested Edits" review queue
A user has recently been suggesting many edits (such as this one — screenshot below) with attempts to include links in the
"Edit Summary".
Many of these edits seem reasonable, but having links in ...
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answers
53
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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, ...
- 101
3
votes
0
answers
50
views
Handling low quality post queue
I am little confused about how to handle low quality post queue. I know there are already some posts like this which try to answer this same question. However, I have moral dilemma.
On one hand, ...
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What adjustments to the new site theme should we request?
As you're all aware, Stack Exchange has implemented a unified theme structure across all network sites, which impacted the appearance of Biology Stack. (See Biology updated site theme is ready for ...
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Help formulating a question
I want to ask a question but I don't know what title to give it so that the subject is clear, and I'm also not sure hpw to explain it clearly in the body. I was wondering if people could provide help ...
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Is it acceptable to use comments to criticize accepted answers?
This question is especially for the moderators, but, of course, anyone is free to answer it.
In a recent comment I criticized the accepted answer to a question arguing that it did not answer the ...
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Book recommendation questions
I'm aware of the necessities of a book recommendation question 'in order to not be considered opinion-based, and therefore closed, book recommendation questions must provide following information:'. (...
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How best to deal with factually incorrect accepted answer?
If someone posts an answer that is factually incorrect one can point this out in a comment on the answer and, if one feels so inclined, add one’s own answer. Another alternative would be to edit the ...
- 26.3k