It's pretty well established that crappy migrations (mostly originating from Stack Overflow) are a recurring problem here on Stack Exchange.
Some have suggested eliminating migrations completely, while others have suggested banning repeat-crap-migrators from voting to migrate in the future. For various reasons, those solutions are not ideal (much as I would love the latter). I would therefore like to propose an intermediate solution: add a "recent (incoming) migrations" review queue to /review
.
Recent migrations have a tendency to exhibit one or more problems:
- Not actually being on topic
- Not being a "good question"
- Being a "bad question"
- Being unclear, vague, etc.
- Not having been edited in the slightest before getting
chucked across the fence to be another site's problem - Glaring grammatical errors
- Being crap
Oftentimes, these problems could be pre-empted by some simple editing or thought of "what's on topic over yonder" by the people frantically hitting "close," but obviously that doesn't happen all the time, so here we are.
By having migrations show up in a review queue, we have the potential to help the user asking the question and the other members of the site:
- If the question was migrated incorrectly, hopefully it'll be sent to the right place sooner
- If the question is altogether off-topic or not a good fit for the Stack Exchange format, the migration can be rejected before the user has to go make an account on yet another site
- The sooner a bad migration gets edited into shape, the more likely it is to get a good answer
- If a question doesn't belong, then the sooner it gets rejected, the less likely users are to waste their time on it
So, how would it work?
Follow the same format as other "review tasks". There would be the following buttons:
Looks good - greyed out until the user upvotes, then dismisses from their queue. If a question gets 3 "looks good" votes, then it's out of the queue and ready to go
Improve - opens the inline editor, and allows the reviewer to make it better.
Off topic - casts a close vote (if 3K+) or flag (if <3K)
Low quality - opens close dialog with standard reasons (if 3K+)
Not sure - moves to the next item without taking any action
This would help everyone - the people asking, the people answering, and the people who get frustrated when the 20th crap migration of the day rolls in!