Recourse for "bad" migrated questions?

Question

It appears to be a bone of contention on many of the sites that subjectively lousy questions are being migrated/dumped on other sites rather than simply being closed as bad questions (the most recent example being https://serverfault.com/questions/276006/ ).

I would like to propose a way to downvote what the receiving site considers a "bad" migration with semantics similar to how downvoting an answer works. This would hopefully encourage the people voting to migrate bad questions to think twice before foisting their site's trash on a sister site.

Lest it seem that I'm singling out SO->SF migrations, I believe SuperUser gets the bulk of the community's trash - a lot of it from ServerFault - and hopefully something like will help keep their corner of the community cleaner as well.

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Some numbers (motivated by @Shog9) -- Perhaps a data.stackexchange.com wizard can enhance this to split by close reason?

Site                 Migrated in  Migrated in then closed  % closed  % Invalid
Stack Overflow         3384               1528              45.1%
Server Fault          10275                402               3.9%
Super User            20517               1047               5.1%
Programmers            6746                399               5.9%

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See Also

• Shog9's answer on Allow diamond moderators to reverse question migrations?
• RD1's answer on Please stop using SoftwareEngineering.SE as your toilet bowl (via Mark Trapp)
• Robert Moir's discussion Should moving "offtopic" questions to other Stack Exchange sites cost reputation?

Answer 1

I'm a moderator on SO and 10K+ user on Programmer's SE. I do, sometimes get slightly annoyed at the quality of questions that are migrated to Programmer's, but many of them can be salvaged with a bit of editorial love, or laid to rest in peace with a few close votes. We can't guarantee a facility well suited for every question under the sun, we can't guarantee a good experience for people who put no effort into their questions.

I personally don't migrate crap questions (via super vote) unless I have time to clean them up a bit. I've been known to close them as off topic to stop a bad migration, edit them, re-open them, clean up comments and then send them on their way. A month after being elected, that became nearly impossible to do because of the sharp increase in the volume of flags.

We're grateful to anyone who spends their time picking up litter, so to say. Sure, we'd like them to throw it in the appropriate bin, since not all questions are biodegradable - but we expect to have to do some sorting. I really don't think attaching a negative stigma to migration votes is going to help anything. I think it would result in a lower quality experience for everyone, while directly opposing the philosophy that's helped to make the sites successful. While we do 'punish' some behavior, we broadly prefer to reward the behavior that we want.

This sounds like a lot of complexity for a very minor problem that is easily cured on the receiving site. I do agree that it can be annoying, but I disagree with the severity that you present.

There is also a flip side to this, where even good questions are questionable (no pun intended) when it comes to migration.

Given my experiences the last few months, I really don't think much can be done to improve the mechanism, and we do have human exception handlers.

Answer 2

I have seen unwanted-but-worthy IP networking questions on StackOverflow from time to time. It is quite annoying to have a question with an accepted answer deleted without a migration. The experience of dealing with conflicting community preferences for IP Networking stuff has given me occasion to ponder solutions to this problem, which probably have general application to any question (not just IP networking stuff).

Whatever the community solution is, I think there need to be (at least) three cases considered before migration:

1. The question has no answers, or stays in negative territory for a couple of hours.
2. The question has an accepted answer
3. The question has an unaccepted answer, or is in positive territory

Case 1: IMO, these situations are often questionable to migrate. The wording / premise could be awful, and the mods at the destination site could understandably object. It's reasonable to put a process in place to manage this kind of migration.

Case 2: These questions deserve migration to some site in the SE network; they got a reasonable answer from someone. While they may be duplicates at the destination site, someone in the community may have put non-trivial time / effort into solving the OP's problem and they should at least get the opportunity to share the knowledge with others and get votes.

Case 3: The question has an unaccepted answer. These are probably less risky than Case 1, but it's still reasonable to put a process in place to manage this kind of migration.

Answer 3

I think this is a terrible idea, unless your goal is to simply hide from users on other sites. I sure wouldn't bother migrated anything, ANYTHING, no matter how good, if the users at the destination could penalize me for it - it's easier to simply vote "off topic" and be done with it. Believe it or not, migration is a courtesy... to the user asking the question, and the site that it's going to. It's extra work, especially if done right.

Also... I dare you to provide evidence that this is actually a problem: Search for closed questions in any time period, and see how many of them come from another site... Then search for closed questions on that site in the same time period, and see how many were closed overall, and how many were migrated. Unless you can show that the first number is a significant percentage of either of the last two, I can't see how this would have any positive effects whatsoever.