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The accepted answer to this question:

Migrate to *any* site?

says:

the best thing to do in this scenario is to flag the question for Moderator attention and mark it as "other". Then add a comment in your flag as to where you think it should be migrated to.

but then, later, it says:

Moderators should only need to intervene in exceptional circumstances.

Migration is not an exceptional circumstance, even if it's not in the "top 5 paths". And please don't say "Oh, but a question can be reposted on the other site" - because with that being the case, it is all the better for the question to be migrated instead.

Notes:

  • This question follows this question of mine.
  • I'd also say that having reviewers do repeat typing is also not "the best thing to do".
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2 Answers 2

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If I look at the data here on MSE (10K only), I see that since the start of 2021 17 questions have been migrated away from MSE. That would boil down to no more than 80 questions a year.

Since March 25th over 45 questions have been deleted. That is more than 10 per day, or over 3,5K per year, or 45x times more often than a migration.

So yeah, migration is an exceptional circumstance.

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  • This does not count cases where migration was possible but not performed. On MSE there are at least a few questions every day that are on topic on SO or elsewhere, which get downvoted and commented on with the stock "I don't know which search brought you here" comment. Usually these questions are low quality but many are salvageable. Also on my 'main' site TeX.SE we often get questions that are on topic on Academia.SE, or Mathematics, or SO, but we don't migrate because we have no paths at all apart from our own meta. If you count these then migration becomes less exceptional.
    – Marijn
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 14:27
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    @Marijn in those cases you could use a custom flag and have moderators do the migration. Usually the lost souls that stumble here on MSE are so heavily downvoted that migration is pointless. When taking into account the adagio of not migrating cr*p many don't even qualify for migration without receiving a major edit first. Work that preferably is done by the OP, which could then just as well be done on a site where their question is on-topic.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 14:32
  • Yes but they are downvoted for posting on the wrong site (in order to get it off the 'Top Questions' list I presume), not because the question is necessarily terrible.
    – Marijn
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 14:40
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    @Marijn a question needs at least a score of -3 in order for people with the trusted user privilege to delete vote on it as soon as possible. The only other option for that is waiting until 48 hours are up. And it takes a score of -8 to get a question off the front page here. So the downvoting is a double-edged sword, but it's kinda necessary. Another important point is that this site gets so many off-topic posts, they were specifically mentioned as one of the reasons there are now moderators here.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 16:21
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    If we had to find a home for each blatantly off-topic question posted here, that would take a considerable chunk of our time. We're not familiar with every site's scope, we would be spending quite some time figuring out site scopes, or pinging other moderators to ask. Migration doesn't necessarily mean the user has an account on the appropriate site, so you'd get orphaned questions that can't be hammered into better shape... Like Geek says in the other answer: Migration, ideally needs a great question asked on the wrong site. The one's asked here simply aren't of that quality.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 16:22
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Migration, ideally needs a *great* question, asked... on the wrong site.

We don't want to just throw anything off topic over the fence - we want the other site to be enriched by the migration and something added to the commons.

That seems pretty exceptional to me, and every so often you have an unusual migration, like Super User to Writing ;)

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