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There has been much discussion recently over when to to migrate questions away from the site. A while back, I found a question on meta.stackexchange which outlined the criteria one should use to make that decision. I can't find the question, but the process is as follows:

  1. Is the question on-topic at your site? If yes, it should stay. (Whether it should be closed for other reasons is not relevant to migration.) If no...
  2. Is the question on-topic at a different site? If yes, then...
  3. Would the question be closed after migration? Some questions are on-topic but too broad, or poorly phrased, too detailed, or problematic for whatever reasons. Mods will generally handle this communication in the mod chat rooms, simply because posting a new question on meta anytime a potential migration comes up would quickly become unmanageable for both sites. This should be handled via flags, a mod will see the flag and we can ask the site whether they want it.

So, I'm proposing that we use this as our template for migration.

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  • I realize that I went against the above guidelines myself recently, which is why I posted this; both as a reminder to myself and as a way of "officializing" these rules.
    – eykanal Mod
    Commented May 20, 2014 at 14:24
  • I hope that these guidelines are applicable across all SE network. It appears that they aren't.
    – adipro
    Commented May 20, 2014 at 14:44

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I agree with this policy, I would like to extend it to consider the case where the OP asks for the migration. If a question is on-topic, but after discussion in the comments, it appears that the question would receive a better audience at another site and the OP wish to migrate the question accordingly, then the question should be migrated.

In other words, if you think that a question would be better suited on another site, then leave a comment.

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Given this, I would add:

  • If there is reason* to suspect that the answer to 1. Is the question on-topic at your site? will be controversial, let the question be put on hold (and give a chance for OP to edit, high-rep users to vote to re-open, people to comment, etc.) before considering migration.

* For example, reasons might include: if the question has more than a couple of upvotes, if there is an answer with more than a couple of upvotes, if there is a healthy debate in the comments as to whether it's on topic, etc.

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For the sake of keeping everything related to migration in this question, shall we apply the same criteria whether the question already has (good) answers or not?

For instance, my question Is there any efficient non-linear note-taking software? was recently suggested to be moved to SR.SE, which didn't exist when the question was asked. Although the question was not migrated, because it is somehow relevant to Ac.SE, I was wondering whether it should have been the same if there was no answers (there are currently 10 answers, and 44 up votes).

Intuitively, I would rather not move questions with several good answers, because that means that somehow, the question is a good fit, especially that migrated questions are automatically deleted after a while, right?

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    Migrating questions that have been answered is generally discouraged (since the point of migration is to move it somewhere it has a higher chance of getting answered).
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented May 23, 2014 at 17:41

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