Please don't migrate low-quality questions to other sites

Question

A question was migrated to ServerFault that made many of the more active members scratch their heads:

https://serverfault.com/questions/246706/what-is-the-max-bandwith-of-lan-and-wan-network

The above question has no redeeming qualities, has no potential for being expanded upon and cannot be answered because its basic premise if flawed. It's just noise. I and others of ServerFault would like to request that more consideration of the question's merit be given before migration to ServerFault. We know the fine folks of StackExchange can spot dead ringers like this and quash them.

Some questions for discussion:

EDIT 3: Time to refocus! I think there are two things that are most consternating SF members. I've been consulting with some of them in chat and here's what it seems to boil down to in two points:

1. We are a bit confused over the unilateral decision to move a question over to SF. This is not to point fingers at one person. We believe that if the community process of voting to migrate questions is allowed to work its course then this and many other migration dust-ups will be avoided. It is our belief that if the original question that started this discussion was put up in front of multiple community members, most would see it as technically impossible to answer. Is moderator intervention a cultural thing at SO? Is this something SF just needs to deal with?
2. We have what we believe is a reasonable expectation that both communities know enough about the other from cultural and technical vantage points to be able to weed out a large majority of questions like these. Indeed, I think we do help each other out most of the time. Perhaps SF users were just incredulous that someone would not be able to spot this as a ridiculously open-ended, impossible-to-answer question. Maybe we're petty about that, but we still harbor a suspicion that any developer with virtually any amount of experience would be able to spot this question as subjective impossible to answer. ("subjective" was not at all the right term to use. Thanks @Xoum!) That confused us and made us suspicious that we were being used as a dumping grounds.

---

Original post:

2. Regardless of anyone's technical experience with networking, why was this question considered to be worthy of migration?
3. Furthermore, why the unilateral decision made by one person rather than letting the community decide on it? Surely at least one person in five on Stack Overflow would be able to see this as a non-question.
4. EDIT 2: Is there a culture of moderator unilateralism at StackOverflow that does not exist on ServerFault? I think part of the frustration is that a community migrated question takes 5 votes, and out of five people, most should have seen it as an illegitimate question. Enough people voting to close it would have sent the signal up that it's not migration material. However, if there's more of an acceptance of unilateralism at SO, then we at SF need to understand that.
5. Finally, what can we at ServerFault do to make the purpose of the site be more apparent so more and more poorly migrated questions die before being moved? We at ServerFault are trying to keep the site from being the place for SO's off-scouring (just as we ourselves are trying to keep SU from being the dumping grounds for our off-scouring)

On the flipside of this issue, we at ServerFault genuinely try to reduce the signal to noise ratio of questions migrated to SE. For example, "What are pylons and how can I get the Twitters to work on them using ADA?" will never see the light of your day (that question is the same caliber as the ServerFault question above and virtually anyone that works in IT professionally can see it as such). However, if we miss some, please tell us that we may learn better.

---

EDIT 1: Some have brought up the topic that many, many garbage questions get quashed and never see ServerFault or other StackExchange sites and that it's only the one or two oddball cases that make waves. I agree. All in all, I believe that ServerFault denizens are appreciative of the many StackOverflow users who accurately kill off bad questions. We thank you for that. I think, however, that we can all do even better to make the purpose of each site better known to members of sister sites. In the end, yes, we all need to understand that not being intimately familiar with each sister site means that there will be poorly migrated questions that grace must be extended to. I'm fine with that, and I think most people are too.

Answer 1

Regardless of anyone's technical experience with networking, why was this question considered to be worthy of migration?

Presumably because Robert Harvey did not know that the premise was flawed. He can't be expected to know everything remotely relating to computers, nor do we expect him to. It probably appeared to him as a legitimate SF question, so that's why he took the action he took.

Furthermore, why the unilateral decision by one person rather than letting the community decide on it? Surely at least one person in five on Stack Overflow would be able to see this as a non-question.

Because Robert Harvey is a moderator elected by the community.

Finally, what can we at ServerFault do to make the purpose of the site be more apparent so more and more poorly migrated questions die before being moved? We at ServerFault are trying to keep the site from being the place for SO's off-scouring (just as we ourselves are trying to keep SU from being the dumping grounds for our off-scouring)

Close off-topic questions. Proposals to have the accepting community (in this case, SF) vote to accept a migration have historically failed. Mostly, as far as I can tell, questions based on flawed premises are closed and not migrated, but it require the question to be recognized as having a flawed premise, which depends on the knowledge of the closer(s).

I understand that it can be frustrating to get questions migrated to you that are off-topic; however, there's only so much that can be done. SO receives many, many more questions that any other site on the SE network—not every one can be dealt with in a perfect manner.

---

In response to your edits:

We are a bit confused over the unilateral decision to move a question over to SF. This is not to point fingers at one person. We believe that if the community process of voting to migrate questions is allowed to work its course then this and many other migration dust-ups will be avoided. It is our belief that if the original question that started this discussion was put up in front of multiple community members, most would see it as technically impossible to answer. Is moderator intervention a cultural thing at SO? Is this something SF just needs to deal with?

No, most moderation is undertaken by the community on SO. However, with the sheer mass of questions, there are going to be some questions that are seen by a mod before the community sees them. And in this case, the question was off-topic for SO, and looked like a good fit for SF. If mods can't migrate questions because they don't know 100% that the receiving site is going to like it, we'd paralyze the system. This is the best compromise—it takes very little effort for the receiving site to close the question. Now, if this is epidemic, we'd certainly like to see a list of example questions so we can figure out what's going wrong, where it's going wrong, and how we can fix it. However, it seems like this is a one-time thing that a mod saw simply before the rest of the community did.

We have what we believe is a reasonable expectation that both communities know enough about the other from cultural and technical vantage points to be able to weed out a large majority of questions like these. Indeed, I think we do help each other out most of the time. Perhaps SF users were just incredulous that someone would not be able to spot this as a ridiculously open-ended, impossible-to-answer question. Maybe we're petty about that, but we still harbor a suspicion that any developer with virtually any amount of experience would be able to spot this question as subjective and impossible to answer. That confused us and made us suspicious that we were being used as a dumping grounds.

Trust me, many devs would not have known anything was wrong until he/she consulted Wikipedia. That's different from a layman in that the dev would understand why something was wrong—he has the ability to understand unlike a layman, but it's not his/her area of expertise. That's not to say there aren't developers who would have noticed a problem right away, but also realize that many devs work at a level where networking is abstracted to a level where they don't need to understand it.

Answer 2

The "question" in question should have been nuked. End of story.

I agree -- where it was migrated is kind of irrelevant. It's simply a low-quality question not worth moving, and thus it should have been deleted or simply closed as off-topic.

The golden rule of question migration: never migrate crap!

Answer 3

Hmmm, do you imply that ServerFault should not accept naive or otherwise hobbyist questions?

There are plenty of noob questions with flawed premises on StackOverflow. Explaining why they are flawed is part of the Q&A game, don't you think?

[...] that any developer with virtually any amount of experience would be able to spot this question as subjective

By the way, there is no "subjectivity" in the discussed question - its "a priori" intention is to try to get some sort of fact. The OP is just ignorant about something which is utterly obvious for you (LAN/WAN concepts), and that's where you could have helped him.

In any case, whatever your attitude towards the faulty question is, I believe there is some overreaction here about its migration.

Answer 4

It's a bad question, but it's a bad SF/SU question, not a bad SO question.

It's easier for a SF person to determine it's a bad question than for a SO person to do it. Even if the SO person spent one minute googling to work that it's a bad question, that's still too much effort.

Answer 5

My point of course is that the close dialog clearly indicates the scope of the site the question is being migrated to.