tl;dr - Let the target site vote on whether or not to accept a migrated question into its community in order to help enforce the Don't Migrate Crap idea.
Even with limited migration paths, quite often (that is, far too often) a question gets migrated to a site when it really should have just been closed on the original site. We have the Golden Rule of Migration™ (ie Don't Migrate Crap) yet it still happens wasting time for those in the target community, leading to confusion for the OP, a waste of clicks by those who stumble upon the question in the future, etc.
Occasionally a diamond mod on the source site will post a question to the potential target site's meta asking if that community wants a particular question or if should just be closed on the target site. This is great, and I would love it to happen more often. But, it's rare (at least in my experience).
What I propose is a mechanism for target communities to reject migrations before they are finalized. The process would work something like this:
- The community where the question is posted votes to migrate the question (no change from current functionality)
- A notice is presented to the target community (possibly similar to the pending edit notification) saying that another community wants to migrate a question to them
- Members of the target community review the pending migration and vote on whether or not to accept the migration
- If the migration is accepted it is completed as it is today.
- If the migration is rejected then the question stays on the original site and is closed as Off-Topic. Or, even better, with an indication that the migration was rejected by the target community.
- 5 votes to accept or 5 votes to reject completes the voting (ie- first to 5 wins)
I would think that those with the Vote to Close privilege on the target community would be given this new Review Pending Migration privilege.
I also think that ALL migrations should be given this review, regardless of being migrated by 5 community members or by a diamond mod.
There would also be the question of whether or not migrated questions could then be closed on the target site, or at least whether or not they should be closed within X amount of time from being migrated. I could go either way on this one.
Again, nothing about the migration mechanics would change with regards to any existing answers, votes, comments, etc. That all stays the same. This is just a proposal for a migration holding tank, if you will.
My hope is that this will lead to more scrutiny when migrating, especially if there is a notice on the original site saying a migration was rejected. It should also help to reduce the gray area between some migration paths such as Stack Overflow <--> Programmers
and Server Fault <--> Webmasters or Dba
.