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The question "What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?" has been posted here at Academia.SE and simultaneously over at Matheducators.SE. When I noticed this I commented on both questions and gave the link to the respective other site. I guessed that mods or high-rep users would take care of this issue. Now what happened is that on Matheducators.SE there is a comment by aeismael asking to keep the question open on Academia.SE and here on Academia.SE my comment with the link to the Matheducators.SE question is deleted.

While I have no particular feeling where the question should be open I think that only one of these questions should be open as long as they are asking precisely the same thing. Keeping both questions open results in exactly the things that crossposts do: Duplicate work on different sites and also an inferior collection of relevant answers on both sides.

My question is: Is the current status OK for the mods here and on Matheducators.SE? How should questions like this, i.e. question that fit on two sites and may receive good answers from both communities, be handled?

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  • If either community decides to close it, the closed one can be migrated and merged with the open one. Right now the one on Academia has only one close vote, though.
    – ff524
    Nov 6, 2015 at 7:59
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    (I un-deleted your comment. I think it's relevant information for potential close-voters, and if neither copy is closed in the end, it's also relevant information for future visitors to the question.)
    – ff524
    Nov 6, 2015 at 8:02

2 Answers 2

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I closed the question on MESE (I am a moderator there) and migrated it here. In addition I flagged it for moderator attention here so that they can be merged.

By contrast, no-one raised any moderator-attention flag on MESE (while for a migration a moderator is needed regardless). The situation would have been handled quite a bit earlier had there been a flag (or other information via dedicate channels) instead of several comments.

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  • I see, it was the first time for me to bring such an issue to attention. I do not use flags much, so I am not really aware, of what flags are available at different sites.
    – Dirk
    Nov 7, 2015 at 21:55
  • No problem. After all you voted to close it. As MESE is small it can just take some time until enough users see it.
    – quid
    Nov 7, 2015 at 22:07
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The consensus on StackExchange seems to be that you shouldn't cross-post questions, even if they are on-topic for both sites.

In this particular case, the question is certainly more general than for math alone. (Note that most answers are not specific to math.) Thus, I'd strongly support closing it on Math Educators and leaving it open on Academia. (Unfortunately, I can't vote over there.)

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