@WYSIWYG Dunno, there's an interesting question about gill function and extracting oxygen from water in there. You could turn it around with a good, detailed answer.
@Ebbinghaus Please don't. We really need to stop abusing the homework close reason. And that question is perfectly on topic. If you don't like it, downvote it, why close it?
I sometimes feel like the biology community believes the only response to questions we don't like is to somehow declare them off topic.
@SanjuktaGhosh No, you should not flag it for mod attention. As I said, this is not an issue that needs moderator intervention. The community should decide. You can cast a downvote if you think it is not useful.
@terdon If it is edited. One can generate several such questions. What would happen if you put a fish in ... [fruit juice, diluted tomato ketchup, blood]. If I have to then I would close it for being too narrow in scope and not useful in general.
@WYSIWYG But why close it at all? I don't understand why we're getting so obsessed with closing things. Bad questions should be downvoted, there's no reason to close.
@WYSIWYG So voting down the question is all we have in hand and when it gets a huge minus something, the moderators step in? Is this how these questions are dealt?
@SanjuktaGhosh No. high negative scores move the question off of the front page and unanswered questions with negative scores get deleted automatically by the system after a while.
What circumstances can cause a question or answer to be deleted, and what does that actually mean?
How can a post be deleted?
When can't I delete my own post?
Can I see a list of my deleted posts?
How can I undelete one of my posts?
What does deletion mean for a post?
How do votes to delete wo...
@terdon I said if I have to close it then I'd close if for the abovementioned reason. Why so much closes? Some users are quite concerned about the site losing quality.
I decided to make a meta post here, so we can discuss the future of Biology Stack Exchange. As we approach 2017 perhaps it would be good to reflect on the successful five years of Biology SE and discuss where we see this site going in the future.
How has Biology Stack Exchange evolved over the y...
@WYSIWYG I know. Personally I am concerned that we close everything and with very unclear/contradictory reasons like 'homework' instead of trying to get the OP to improve or even editing to make the question better.
@terdon Yeah I know the problem with the "homework" close reason. We have always discussed about it without any conclusion. Of late, some users are casting a lot of "homework" close votes.
Closing questions is supposed to give guidance on how to improve them. We aren't. We're just giving a very vague "we don't want this here" message without even indicating what's wrong with it (since homework means something very different).
Yes, I understand this problem. However, there should be a mechanism to filter out extremely "stupid" questions. Downvoting does not often help in these cases.
Many cases do qualify for the usual close reasons.
@WYSIWYG I don't agree there. Downvoting is the way to deal with stupid, but on topic, questions. We are now closing questions we don't like and claiming they are off topic when they aren't. Stupid questions are annoying, but being stupid doesn't necessarily make them off topic.
If they qualify for the close reasons, then great, but I feel we tend to bend the close reasons (the homework one especially) to make it fit any question we don't find interesting.
@WYSIWYG I second this. ''Yes, I understand this problem. However, there should be a mechanism to filter out extremely "stupid" questions. Downvoting does not often help in these cases. Many cases do qualify for the usual close reasons.''
@SanjuktaGhosh If they can be closed for the standard reasons, then great. However, if a question is within the site's scope but "stupid" then it should be downvoted, not closed.
@terdon There are two issues here. Experiences users are unhappy about the site losing quality and being filled with stupid questions. The other issue is the extensive use of close votes which may deter new users. In any case, the homework issue should be resolved immediately.
@WYSIWYG Yes, agreed. The homework thing has gotten way out of hand.
I have to say though that, and I've said this before, I don't think we've ever been a site for experts. We only get very few expert level questions, yes, but that's not new. It's always been that way.
We're nearly 100 days into the beta now, and we have accumulated some nice content here on the site. But one aspect I'm a bit concerned about is the amount of laymen questions compared to expert questions.
My subjective impression is that the largest block of questions are from laymen, asked ou...
@WYSIWYG Yeah, but we are not really doing anything about it. We would need to i) aggressively close non-expert questions (which are on topic at the moment). This would involve a change of scope and a new close reason (Layman question). ii) Start asking technical questions. As far as I can tell, we sort of sit back and hope the experts will come to us instead of making sure the local experts start posting questions.
It seems to me that all we're doing is closing stuff as homework and complaining. We don't give clear guidance to new users about the types of questions welcome here, hell the community itself isn't 100% clear on that. We don't ask our own highly technical questions here.
Most sites that try to be "for experts" on SE fail to do so anyway. SF manages to by being exceedingly aggressive. ELU keeps trying and failing. I think one of the two math sites has managed to, not sure though I don't hang out there.
I totally agree. We would rather google up rather than ask a question here. This site need not be "for experts". It would be great if it is really useful to biology students.
I still feel it would be better to introduce the concept of two obligatory "master tags" that need to go on any question: "expert"/"layman" or something along those lines. Taht would allow people who don't care for layman questions to ignore them.
@WYSIWYG Agreed. Plus, biologists are probably the least computer literate of all scientists. It will be hard to get them on board a platform like SE. Especially since we don't allow bioinformatics stuff.
Though a lot of people around me have seen me spending time on this site, they haven't really thought about posting anything. I do observe that some of them have joined but they haven't progressed beyond 1-2 questions.
I do encourage people all the time.
I have to put my stickers on my lab computer so that people get curious !! :)
@WYSIWYG The problem is that the experts have learned to answer these questions by themselves. I can easily do the lookup for papers myself - this is part of my daily business.
@Chris Exactly. And for the really hard stuff, the chances of finding one of the 5 people in the world who know more about your specific subject than you do on the site are pretty slim.
And for purely lab stuff, you know your local lab technician can probably answer so you go straight there.
I think it's time the Biology community did some serious soul searching to clearly and cleanly define our scope.
We have had a lot of discussion on this issue but no consensus has been reached yet (or we have not resolved the issue).
There are two issues here:
There is no mechanism to filter low quality (content wise) questions which bothers some experienced users
The use of "homework" close reason for ...
Well, silly we can downvote and non-researched we can close with a reason specific to lack of research. One that doesn't include the word homework anywhere.
Never seen a question like this - http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/54106/pen-and-paper-game-to-explain-the-theory-of-evolution before. It's a question asking about teaching methodologies-games. It doesn't seem to be on topic or off-topic as mentioned here- http://biology.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) .@WYSIWYG , @Chris and @terdon what are your take on this?
Now that I'd call off topic. The actual question is: "Does anyone know of such a game or able to construct such a game?" and that has nothing to do with biology.
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is asking whether people know of, or know how to create, a game and not about biology. — terdon14 secs ago
@SanjuktaGhosh It is off-topic. So simply cast a close vote if you can, but there is no reason to flag this for the mods. This should be a community decision and there is no immediate action necessary.
@Chris I flagged the previous one asking for moderators intervention because there was no option provided in the list, nothing concerning a silly question.
In what ways does intuition from subjective experience guide topic choice in neuroscience? How important is it to frame research questions quantitatively? Can our own beliefs about how we think bias what topics are studied in neuroscience?
We have had a lot of discussion on this issue but no consensus has been reached yet (or we have not resolved the issue).
There are two issues here:
There is no mechanism to filter low quality (content wise) questions which bothers some experienced users
The use of "homework" close reason for ...
In what ways does intuition from subjective experience guide topic choice in neuroscience? How important is it to frame research questions quantitatively? Can our own beliefs about how we think bias what topics are studied in neuroscience?
