Migrate shortlist based on tags?

Question

Would it be a good idea to change the migration destination sites based on the question tags?

The new migrate option allows one to select from a limited number of destination sites. This group of sites is the same for a whole site, to keep the list short. However, if a question is tagged with wordpress, it is likely that the WordPress SE site would be a good destination.

What do you think of extending the destination list based on question tags? This would give smaller SE sites a chance of migration input, without polluting the list for all questions. So you still have three or four standard destinations, and then add tag-based destinations to the list.

Answer 1

I like the idea.

Details:

1. Where does the list associating tags to sites come from? The SX team, from site moderators on the receiving site, or from some sort of tag wiki-ish process?
2. Is there meant to be one such list for all sites, or is it to vary from site to site?

Answer 2

As a relatively new SO user, one of the few really frustrating things to me once I hit 3k rep was the migration options. I see a question that clearly belongs on another site, in my case (as a SAS programmer) stats, go to mark it as off topic; and then am presented with a list of irrelevant sites. Prior to hitting 3k, I could always flag for migration; now I can't even do that.

If you don't want regular users migrating based on their judgement, then don't give a migration option to us. If you do want us migrating, then give us logical sites. Based on tags, based on keywords, or just an open text field to enter the URL. Whatever.

Alternately, give the list as now, and then add another option, "Other Site", which then goes into the moderator queue. That at least would make sense, and leave users with a logical response to the OT list...

Answer 3

I started out really liking this idea, but a discussion we had internally swayed me the other way.

Stack Overflow is the only site that would benefit from this for the foreseeable future. That isn't a problem in and of itself, although we do prefer to avoid adding site-specific behaviour, but when a feature would not be used on most of our sites, it gets harder to justify spending time figuring out how to get a feature just right.

Here is our initial (and probably incomplete) list of issues that'd have to be worked out before something like this could be implemented:

1. In the past, we've had to remove a site from the migration destination list because the migrations to it had a very high rate of rejection. In addition to being able to configure per-tag destinations, we'd also have to build a way to prevent certain sites from being chosen.
2. Don't discount the value of a consistent user experience. Showing different choices based on tags could be confusing.
3. We would be opening up a way to retag abuse to force the choice of available migration paths.
4. Migrations are always disruptive to the asker and potentially the answerers, so we don't necessarily want to encourage more of them by making it too easy to migrate a question.

For now, the current system works well enough, with the most popular and functional paths being available to everyone and with the moderators standing by to handle the more exceptional/unusual migration requests.

Answer 4

This feature would be very useful for some tags where the vast majority of questions are being asked in the wrong site.

Approximately 90% of questions about Nginx on StackOverflow should (imho) be migrated to ServerFault as they are almost all 'How do I write this config file?'.

For some of the questions raised above:

• The mapping of tags to other sites shouldn't be complex, it should just be each tag can have one suggested site to migrate questions to.

• The mapping of tags to other sites doesn't need to be dynamic, it should just be set be appropriately high-level moderators.

• In the rare case where there are more than 5 tags that have suggested migrations set for them, which sites are shown should be selected by the popularity of the tags.

Answer 5

I think overall the concept is good. However, while some cases will be fairly clear, for other cases, something like this would be hard to implement.

Which tags apply to which affiliate sites?

Which tags would be used to determine the affiliate? (making up a tag combination for example, algebra+database+algorithm -- Where would this "obviously" go?)

Is there a weighting system involved, or is everything taken to be a 1:1 match? I think weighting would be better, but that much more difficult to tackle.