Should some communities have more than 4 migration targets?

Question

Are the number of migration paths one-size-fits-all?

Server Fault is in a somewhat unique situation as far as sub-communities go (Super User may be in the same boat, but I rarely spend time there any more). Area51 has fractured our community into many smaller, but more highly specialized communities. We have: DBA, Webmasters, Unix, and Security that were all once handled on Server Fault and now have specialized communities. To a lesser extent, some content on Drupal and SharePoint might also have been on-topic for Server Fault at one point, but now has its own community as well.

I've also heard from various Server Fault mods that The Powers That Be have decreed that there will only ever be 4 migration paths. I believe there was also at least one m.so post that's authoritative on that as well.

I think that 4 is a good number for most sites. Bicycles, Gaming, Cooking, English, etc, will likely never need more than one or two migration paths. Four is probably even overkill for them! I feel that Server Fault and possibly Super User are on the opposite end of that spectrum. We have so many sub communities that have split off from us that having more than 4 migrations paths would be both beneficial to users asking the questions and users keeping the original sites tidy.

I don't think that all SE sites having the same number of paths makes sense, especially at the rate that Area51 is popping out new sites with overlapping content.

TL;DR - I don't think that the number of migration paths are one-size-fits-all

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Arguments against adding additional paths

When I've brought this up in the past I've heard a few arguments against adding targets that I'd like to preemptively address:

Only a small percentage of questions are migrated to sites outside of the migration path. It's not really needed.

It's not fair to assume that users will flag and type out an explanation of why something should be migrated somewhere in the path (and risk losing fw) when they can just close it outright as off-topic. There are a lot more users on SO, so I'm sure this isn't a problem for you, someone will likely flag something for migration to the right site. On SF, that's just not the case.

If you increase the number of options, the percentage of questions migrated to those sites will increase.

People are stupid! Too many migration paths will confuse new users!

The threshold for voting to close is 3k. Users should have a good grasp of things by then. I do agree that this could potentially open the door for an increase in "bad" migrations, so I propose a tiered voting system: At 3k, you can vote for the 4 standard paths at 10k you can vote to migrate to a larger set of sites.

This should allow most questions that belong elsewhere to get there safely without much downside. By the time a user hits 10k, he or she should have a good grasp on how we work.

Where do we draw the line for what sites should and should not be in the migration path? It seems like a slippery slope!

Well, it is a slippery slope, but it's one that we're already on. With the success of Area51 and all of the sites that it's launched, we're facing this problem already! Server Fault gets a lot of Unix questions, because people assume we're the best place to ask (and we were at one point), but if they're not System Administration related, we don't want them any more. Times change, we need to keep up!

Area51 is a great thing. We need to make sure that use old foggies from the original trilogy sites can keep up with the times. Adding relevant migration targets helps promote these new communities as well as keeping the original site on-topic.

I think that if a general consensus on each site's meta is that a site should appear in the migration path for 10k users, then we should make it so.

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TL;DR

Pls let us haz moar sites in da migrashun list. Even if it's only for 10k users.

I know that The Powers That Be have been adamant in the past about the number of migration targets in the list, but I think that it really needs to be reconsidered in light of the success of Area51 and the new communities that overlap with us old-timers from the original trilogy.

Answer 1

First, some stats:

In the last 90 days (data gathered on January 15th 2012), Server Fault has had 597 question migrated away from it:

• Super User†: 332, 12% rejected
• Stack Overflow†: 74, 10% rejected
• Unix & Linux: 47, 14% rejected
• DBA: 35, 8% rejected
• Apple: 32, 0% rejected
• Web Masters†: 27, 7% rejected
• Ubuntu: 20, 5% rejected
• Security: 18, 0% rejected
• SharePoint: 7, -- not enough data
• Programmers: 2, -- not enough data
• WordPress, Web Apps, Project Management, Electronics: 1 each, -- not enough data

_{†Existing migration targets at time of writing.}

Tossing out the rejections, this would mean that approximately 154 legitimate migrations were not covered by our migration targets (compared to 384 that were).

Note, there's about a 10% chance the migration is rejected (closed on the destination site); this is important.

To get a feel for how many questions are slipping through the cracks due to missing migration targets, here's a Google doc of the last 50 off-topic questions that were not migrated and have not yet been deleted‡ (+ if they should have been migrated).

Of those questions that could have been (I hesitate to say should, as they were almost universally a bad and not migrating garbage is 100% correct even if the question is nominally on topic elsewhere) migrated, overwhelming they would have been moved to Super User, after that Stack Overflow, and then a smattering of edge cases (Unix/Linux & Ask Ubuntu in my opinion).

_{‡So everyone can see them; this excluded 2 questions from the sample.}

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Conclusions I'm comfortable drawing from this investigation:

• we're not dropping many migrations
  • essentially everything that should be migrated ends up migrated, it's a question of voting or flagging not end results
  • corollary, we're still migrating some things that should be (~10% rejection rate)
• Web Masters probably shouldn't be a top level migration target
  • obvious candidate to replace it is DBA
• Unix and Linux might need to be a migration target
  • there's an open slot, it gets about 2/3rds the legit migrations Stack Overflow does

Assuming Unix & Linux was already a migration target, we'd have seen approximately 1.3 "resulted in migration" flags per-day on Server Fault (that's including those ultimately rejected by the destination site) over the last 90 days. This seems reasonable, given how murky the on/off-topic status of a question can often be.

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I'm very much against gating access to migration targets based on reputation, it doesn't follow in my opinion.

Consider, at 3K Server Fault reputation you're expected to know what is on-topic for Server Fault. You can vote to close with a curated list of "good chance" targets for the migration case.

At 10K reputation... you've got 7K more experience with Server Fault but nothing with any of the other sites on the network. What's changed that would justify more migration targets? It just doesn't follow that higher rep on Site A implies understanding of Site B (Jon Skeet would be omniscient by now were that the case).

Moderators have the recourse of discussing flagged questions with moderators on other sites, which side steps the whole per-site concerns. Of course, moderators being human, mistakes still happen.

I'm also just generally against increasing the complication of the migration system; increased complexity drives existing users away (at least from the feature), and makes Stack Exchange even harder for new users to approach than it already is. If we had strong evidence the current system wasn't working we'd have no choice to apply tweaks (or overhaul the whole thing), but what I'm seeing doesn't make me feel anything drastic is necessary.

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Based on this data, the Community Team reached out to the Server Fault moderators to see if they were OK with changing the migration targets.

The majority were behind it, so we've made the migration target changes.

Answer 2

This is particularly a problem for ServerFault: We receive an avalanche of questions that are absolutely not about system administration, including:

• Programming questions (-> StackOverflow, check)
• "How do I get my desktop to do X" questions (-> SuperUser, check)
• "How do I do X on my Linux desktop?" (-> Unix & Linux, missing)
• Questions specifically about databases/DBA (-> DBA, missing)
• Questions about website stuff (-> Webmasters, check)

The net result of a lack of migration choices is questions being closed as Off-Topic: Off Topic ("Go away, we don't want your kind here!") rather than being migrated to a site where the user can get help.
(If we want to talk about the psychology of choice let's also talk about the path of least resistance: It's easier to vote to close as off topic than to flag and type in "Probably belongs on Other Site")

I think the current method of picking the migration targets is probably fine, but the proliferation of StackExchange sites seems to require at least one additional migration "slot", if not two.

Answer 3

I can't help thinking 5 migration targets like we have now is an arbitrary choice as it is - why not 4, or 6?

In any case, I agree that the current "5 and damn the torpedoes" option is not great. The Stack Exchange team can't have it both ways; If the sort of fragmentation and splintering that Area51 can cause is seen as a good thing, then tools that scale to cope with the side effects of that fragmentation must also be a good thing.

I think there are certain "families" of sites within Stack Exchange, for example the computer related ones, and I'd like to see us able to migrate between all those sites when they are out of beta. A "tree" migration system might help prevent the menu from getting too large, though at the risk of hiding some options from people who aren't prepared to look for them (but then I suspect these people are already not flagging and asking for moves to unlisted sites).

Answer 4

Say a 10k user votes to close an SF question and uses this new tiered ability to recommend migration to IT Security. What happens if the next four visitors to that question are 5k users? Will they now be able to vote to migrate to IT Security as well?

What if two 4kers show up before a 13ker and think "I wish I could migrate this to IT Security, but I'll have to settle for 'Off Topic' and a flag"?

I'm not necessarily against this proposal, but I'm not sure how to work out its side effects.

Answer 5

Alternate idea instead of adding more migration radio buttons -- Keep the migration list as-is for users below a given threshold (10K?).

For users above the threshold present the current migration list, plus a list of all the live StackExchange sites for them to select from. If one of those sites is selected as a migration candidate replace the lowest-ranked site in the list for users below the threshold.

This sounds like a lot more programming work than adding another slot or two for migrations, but addresses the choice paralysis issue Bart brought up and lets everyone with vote-to-close privileges participate in the migration decision while also giving more experienced users a broader range of migration choices.

Answer 6

...what about adding migration lists based on the tags the question has? Include some common defaults but tack on one or two "probable" migrations based on that...

I liked the tiering idea, but I wondered if it's not something that would be imbalanced (i.e., if the question belongs in XYZ instead of here, the user should have some way of getting it in the apropos spot, even if they're not an overly experienced user.)

I can understand it being kind of like another unlocked achievement, but here you're talking about a fundamental tool for keeping sites clean and proper (and getting the "right" eyes on the problem for a solution) so maybe using a tiered gaming system isn't apropriate (or it may allow a question to be migrated to yet another wrong site before it finds a proper home.)

Answer 7

Another suggestion to add to the growing list:

How about giving users with the "Cast close and reopen votes" privilege to vote to migrate to any other site where they have that same privilege?

For example, if I have enough to rep to cast migration votes on Stack Overflow, AND I have enough rep to cast votes on e.g. Cooking (for example) then it's implied by my privileges that I know enough about BOTH communities to understand whether a given question on one of these sites is on-topic on the other.

In fact, come to think of it, wouldn't it be better if the existing radio button list did this rather than use a hard-coded list of sites? I've read complaints in the past about people migrating bad-subjective (as opposed to good-subjective) questions to Programmers, thinking that they would be on topic there. This suggestion would presumably cut down on occurences of this problem.