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As per community consensus we would like to have a migration path to Stack Overflow.

Statistics shows that it would be used fairly often, and that the moderators (who currently have to perform all migrations) have an excellent rejection rate.

Please enable that one for us.

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  • $\begingroup$ there is not already a "migration path"? what does this mean? $\endgroup$
    – vzn
    Jan 5, 2016 at 17:36
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    $\begingroup$ @vzn See here. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Jan 5, 2016 at 17:41

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In the last 90 days, there have been 16 CS => SO migrations and 2 have been rejected.1 That migration volume falls just short of my prefered criteria.2

That said, there have been 94 questions closed with the custom reason pointing to Stack Overflow. Since these were not migrated, we can't actually know how many would have been rejected, however. (Migrating them now would very likely require checking that those questions have not already been reposted. The close reasons suggest this is somewhat common.) Without knowing the rejection rate, we can't estimate how many of those questions would have been productively migrated.

Of course the whole reason for establishing a default path is to make migration easier. As long the path of least resistance is the custom close reason, I suspect migrating from CS to SO will be rather rare. That's not a bad outcome, in my opinion. For people new to the network, having your question migrated to a whole 'nother site can be confusing and frustrating. And, of course, new users are the most likely to misunderstand the scope of the sites.

On the other hand, if moderators are willing to handle more migration request flags and try moving a greater percentage of questions, we could revisit this analysis in a few months.


Footnotes:

  1. This doesn't match the statistics seen on this site because of wierdness.

  2. And if you don't like my criteria, you should know that other CMs have an even higher bar.

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  • $\begingroup$ Since users can not migrate right now, every such action would have to have been taken by moderators. I myself did not migrate if a) I was not sure the question would be welcome and/or best placed on Stack Overflow or b) I thought the question may be ontopic after an edit. Which closing reason to pick then (default vs "go to SO") is not always clear, and questions frequently get votes on both (the majority wins). So these figures are hard to interpret. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Jan 6, 2016 at 14:54
  • $\begingroup$ My takeaway: migrate more aggressively and see how that works in terms of rejection rates. Correct? (Disclaimer: I think that is a bad idea compared to having the migration path and seeing how that goes, because I for one am less familiar with the scope of Stack Overflow than many of our non-moderator users, so I think they could make the better decisions in this respect.) $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Jan 6, 2016 at 14:56
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    $\begingroup$ @Raphael No, we should not migrate aggressively. We get a lot of crap programming questions, mostly “heres my code it not work help”, this probably accounts for at least half of those 94 closed-but-not-migrated questions. We also get quite a few decent questions about programming homework that was assigned in a CS curriculum, and for those, migration is a less confusing and frustrating experience than outright closure. $\endgroup$ Jan 6, 2016 at 16:24
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    $\begingroup$ @Raphael: This is the crux of the Catch-22: if it's easier to migrate questions, it's more likely that migrations will be rejected. Rejected migration are exponentially worse for the asker's user experience than a simple close. It's also a lot more work for everyone who touches the question. This is one of the reasons we drag our feet adding default paths. $\endgroup$ Jan 6, 2016 at 17:02

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