Should we migrate questions from other SE sites?

Question

I have seen some questions on other SE sites which are closed. For example this question (there are more of them):

What's the best CDN for image hosting on a high-volume web site?

This question has been closed with the reason:

closed as off-topic by Bill the Lizard♦ Oct 11 '13 at 18:30
This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

"Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it." – Bill the Lizard
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I have flagged this question because it might fit better at Software Recommendations.

declined - It's too old to migrate, and they aren't taking migration from SO.

Yes this question might be old, but this question is still on-topic here isn't it?

And "They aren't taking migration from SO", Shouldn't we take migrations from SO?

Answer 1

A vast majority of the recommendation questions asked on other Stack Exchange sites are crap and we don't want them.

When the site started, we asked moderators on other Stack Exchange sites not to migrate anything to SR.SE until they got a green light from the SR moderators. We wanted to first establish our quality standards and have enough of a moderating community to handle incoming migrations.

I think we've reached the stage where we can handle a slow trickle¹ of incoming migrations, but the problem remains to only accept migrations of sufficient quality. We only want questions that match our question quality guidelines. We can't expect all moderators to know these guidelines.

Furthermore, migration is only useful when there are answers worth keeping. If none of the answers match our answer quality guidelines, there's nothing gained by migrating the answers.

For the time being, I think it's better to ask people to repost, and point them to our question quality guidelines. Also, if you see SR.SE mentioned in a comment, please make sure that readers are informed of the guidelines by posting a link.

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This particular question is too old to migrate. In addition, it isn't asking for software but for hosting, which is off-topic here.

¹ _{Keep in mind that the question volume of SR is 1/500th of SO. If SO migrates one question in 500 to us, that would double our volume. We can't handle much more volume, we're barely keeping up with the commenting, closing, voting, flagging, etc. now.}

Answer 2

Here's a really great single word answer... Sometimes

For that particular question No

The general rules I'd say should be:

No:

• Anything older than the normal migration limits (that question)
• Anything that doesn't match SR (that question - it is for a service not a software, see: Are hosting recommendation requests on-topic?)
• Very Low Quality questions - sure comment that it could be asked here if rewritten but migrate no.

Yes:

• On topic here
• reasonable or high quality (or at least improvable)

Answer 3

Yes we should, and on a more macro level we should develop a migration strategy. There are a lot of quality questions on both SE and SU that are now in the purview of this site. If we do this we need to:

• Work out a daily/weekly volume with the SE/SU moderators.
• Identify questions on the other sites that we would like migrated.
• Ensure SE/SU mods mark NEW questions on their sites as OT, and migrate them.
• Assign mods here to handle just the migration volume.
• Start accepting all NEWLY asked questions from other sites (I have even pointed people on the Writers Beta here), we can manage the quality of those items the same way were they asked here on this site. (Again this may necessitate more mods...)

We are currently sitting at 66% of questions answered...and a lot of the unanswered questions are in the universe of custom script work for a very specific scenario. Migrating good questions that already have good answers will help up that percentage if nothing else.