How to migrate old questions to a new graduated site

Question

Preamble

Since their introduction, migrations have been largely well received, but still cause some problems, typically in the area of folks migrating questions to sites they didn't understand or migrating subpar questions.

One of the key guidelines for migrating questions (after "don't migrate crap") is "don't migrate old, answered questions".

Amble

We recently disabled migrations on questions older than 60 days, which goes a long way towards resolving problems with such migrations, but does leave two holes:

1. New sites (like Mathematica) that form successful communities of their own, even if born out of a larger site like Stack Overflow.
2. Old questions that haven't received answers but fell through the cracks of time.

The second is easy: if the question is off-topic on your site, vote to close it as such regardless of its age or quality. You can leave a comment on the post suggesting a better location. If the asker is still around and interested in the answer, they will be grateful and will repost the question in a better location to get their solutions.

The first, however, requires a bit more of a process. Let's say you're on a smaller site that has grown to the point where you want to start considering picking some canonical questions that have already been asked and answered elsewhere. Here's how you can get some (or all) of them migrated to your site:

1. Start on your meta. Build a list of questions that you think would benefit from being migrated to your site and collect some reasons along with each one. Don't just say "all questions in our tags!". That's neither going to happen nor is a good approach - do you really want to swarm your new community with old content?

   This is also your opportunity to edit old questions to make them more in line with your scope and standards.

   Once you have your list...

2. The questions will be vetted by the source community as well. The exact details here are still to be worked out, but the idea is that we would present these questions to the relevant subcommunities of the original site. For example, questions that are candidates for migration to Mathematica would be vetted by the regulars of mathematica on Stack Overflow.

   Some form of discussion will ensue and by the end of it we will have the final list of questions to move over.

3. We will do a one-time mass migration of the questions that make the cut. This has some additional implications. For example, your front page on the smaller site will be more or less destroyed for a bit, so make each question count.

Once this migration happens, the topic is closed. There will be no more discussions, migrations, exceptions, etc. where old questions are concerned. You're free to still edit and migrate new questions if needed.

What happens if some of the questions you wanted don't get migrated? Just treat the original site like you would any external blog. If someone asks a similar question on your site and you're certain that you can't do better than the original version elsewhere, summarize it, give credit to the author, and link back to the original.

Postamble

In my experience, there are definite reasons to sometimes migrate old questions to new sites, but those are rare and should remain exceptional. This system should hit on those cases, allow both communities to have a voice, and miss ones where a migration would do more harm than good.

Answer 1

I see this as being fine for most sites except for Stack Overflow for two reasons.

The first is the sheer size of Stack Overflow. You can't expect someone to curate all the content in a single tag on Stack Overflow and expect it to be comprehensive in any way. To close off the avenue for migration at a later point seems to limit the options too much when the source site is Stack Overflow.

The second is how on topic a question is on the source site. If the question is clearly on topic on Stack Overflow, there is no reason to have it migrated to another site, no matter how badly they want it.

It was explained to us at one time that we should be jealous of our sites when it comes to the topic of migrations, and that stuck. If a question is on topic, answered on Stack Overflow, there's no reason for it to be migrated anywhere.

Granted, there's a little bit of pride in the second point, but that was the point behind what we were told; the question lived here for a long time, we put the work into it, there's no reason that we shouldn't be the one to keep it if it clearly has had a place here for so long.

There's no perceptible benefit to a source site that migrates questions away that are good and on-topic. Yes, there's absolutely a benefit for the destination site, but if it's at the cost of another site (even one as big as Stack Overflow; the argument "you can handle it" isn't acceptable) then it absolutely should not happen.

Finally, there's a huge concern about moderators from the source site (they are not included in who would be consulted on the source site) being involved with the process. As moderators, we are expected to be able to moderate content across all the tags; we aren't expected to be subject experts in every tag, but we're expected to be able to identify good quality, on topic content when we see it (as well as the inverse of that).

If as moderators we are able to do that, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to participate in determining which questions from the source site should go and which should stay, we wouldn't be moderators if we weren't expected to be able to do that in the first place.

Something to consider:

You're an active user on your site. You're passionate about the site and the quality of content on your site and constantly work towards constantly improving it. Yes, you know that there's overlap with another site, but your site is successful because it doesn't need the content from the overlapping site.

Now someone from that other site wants to take that content, as it's on topic for both and now able to be considered for migration due to this proposal.

What's the benefit to your site? Why does a site that has proven that it doesn't already need the content from your site get to take away something that it doesn't need, and will harm you in the process?

How does taking quality content that is on topic for help that site, or at the least, not harm it in any way?