CallForHelp

Draft of a "call for participation"

Help make the Wiki awesome!

The SEQanswers wiki (or "SEQwiki" for short) is a great help for users of this forum: It's a catalog of high-throughput sequencing tools. There is currently an effort to get the SEQanswers forum and the wiki published in the next NAR database issue. This is a great opportunity to get the wiki in shape: Some of the tool descriptions are just "stubs", but in order for those pages to be really helpful, we need ten minutes of your time.

We invite everyone to pick one (or of course more!) tools that she or he uses and improve its description in the wiki. This will help others tremendously when they decide which tool to use. It's also the perfect opportunity to write down the sometimes annoying things that are often not mentioned on the homepages of those tools.

Here are some suggestions what you could write about your tool:

• Which tasks is the tool good at? (something like: "really fast read mapping")
• What are the limitations? In which situations would the tool not be appropriate? ("cannot find indels", "needs at least least 32 GB RAM")
• Are there any pitfalls? Any idiosyncrasies when using the tool? ("be careful: if the input file is corrupt, there's no error message -- and the results will even look meaningful")
• Which alternative tools exist? ("if you still use MAQ, you should switch to BWA")
• Are there related tools? (on the BWA page: "Seal uses the BWA algorithm, but runs on a Hadoop cluster")

Since the wiki is there to help us decide which tool to use for a specific purpose, please also try to update the tags for your tool. Just try to make it fit into the "Browse software" page!

While you are editing and using the wiki, please also let us know about any issues you have with the wiki software itself -- things perhaps only an administrator can change. Do any templates look ugly? Is the navigation too confusing? Don't like the fonts? We cannot promise to take care of everything, but please tell us!