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Apparently there's a means to add a list of 'blessed sites' for migration, so that we might vote on migrating the odd question, rather than waiting for a moderator to do it?

If so, presumably a data query can be run on travel to see the most commonly migrated-to sites, but I assume this would include money, the great outdoors, cycling, and hopefully soon the expats site.

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  • Let me find my data query ...
    – hippietrail
    Jan 6, 2014 at 11:07
  • 1
    Shockingly, there are no migrations between Great Outdoors and ourselves in either direction. Or if I'm incorrect you have my SQL code to debug (-:
    – hippietrail
    Jan 6, 2014 at 11:16
  • What's shocking about that?
    – user3470
    Jan 6, 2014 at 13:42
  • I expected it would be one of the major ones, and so did Mark. Stats trump intuitions yet again.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 6, 2014 at 13:47
  • Regarding the small number of migrations, I vaguely recall questions being closed with everybody apparently agreeing (comments + votes) that another site would be better suited but nothing happening (probably because nobody, least of all myself, knows how to actually migrate a question or who could do it).
    – Relaxed
    Jan 10, 2014 at 21:52
  • @Annoyed agreed, this has certainly happened in the past. As plebs we can't do it, but mods can, so it's a case of flagging it for a mod, and if appropriate, they'll take care of it.
    – Mark Mayo
    Jan 10, 2014 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Here's my Data Explorer query to get our top migration sites.

As of right now the output looks like this:

5 < money.stackexchange.com
5 > bicycles.stackexchange.com
2 > superuser.com
2 < cooking.stackexchange.com
1 < english.stackexchange.com
1 < islam.stackexchange.com
1 < judaism.stackexchange.com
1 < politics.stackexchange.com
1 < programmers.stackexchange.com
1 < scifi.stackexchange.com
1 < webapps.stackexchange.com
1 > answers.onstartups.com
1 < android.stackexchange.com
1 < anime.stackexchange.com
1 < bicycles.stackexchange.com

Legend:

  • > means it was migrated from travel to the other site.
  • < means it was migrated to travel from the other site.

Make of it what you will ...

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  • 3
    Or it could prove that most users have got no clue how to get a question migrated using the current "system".
    – hippietrail
    Jan 6, 2014 at 13:28
  • I don't understand where you got these figures (they don't match with the query you link). Could you give the figures from travel.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats (I can't because that page is 10k-only)?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 6, 2014 at 21:27
  • @Gilles: I didn't know about that page. It only tells us about the last 90 days, in which there were five migrations. To use the linked query you might have to manually select "Travel Answers". It might default to StackOverflow for some reason.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 7, 2014 at 2:27
  • All-time migrations isn't a useful figure, it's migrations per unit of time. You want to have migration paths for 5 migrations in 90 days? That's at least an order of magnitude away.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 7, 2014 at 10:33
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    To give you an idea, on Security, a migration path was created to SU when there were about one per week, and slightly less than that to SO, with a negligible rejection rate and no contention regarding topicality. There is no path from Security to SF because of too many rejections and no path to Crypto because it's in beta.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 7, 2014 at 10:41
  • You sound a bit snarky in some comments. Mostly we were just curious, and partly the current user interface seems either confusing or broken to not just me. You say all-time migrations isn't useful but it still seems useful.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 7, 2014 at 13:14
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Migration paths are only created if a need is demonstrated. It isn't “open it and see if anybody goes through”, it's “there have been many flags and the moderators are tired of dealing with them.” There's no precise threshold, but one migration every month won't cut it. One migration every day would.

Sure, there would be more migrations if there was a predefined path. But not that many more.

There are no migration paths to beta sites, so Bicycles is the only candidate at the moment. (I personally disagree with this policy, but that's how it is.)

Another consideration to take into account is questions that would be wrongly migrated, either because they're off-topic or otherwise unsuitable on the target site, or because they were on-topic here in the first place. I already see a lot of questions being closed because they happen to be about walking outdoors, or about cycling, or about something that an expat might to, even though they are perfectly fit for this site since they are about travel. On these grounds alone I would be very cautious in opening a migration path.

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  • Is "migration path" another name for "blessed site"? About "wrongly migrated" questions, I remember a few times I asked questions about banks/cards/ATMs and each time getting suggestions to move it to personal finance. When one was moved it was no good there. I asked them to migrate it back since it had a good answer here, but they never did. So something there seems broken too. I'm also not familiar with the lots of closed walking outdoors or cycling questions here. We have active walking and bicycles tabs. As for expats we should not close things they "might do" but things "only they" do.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 7, 2014 at 2:34
  • @hippietrail “Blessed site” is nonstandard terminology, “migration path” is the official term for a site that appears as a potential migration target when closing as off-topic. Moderators can migrate to any site (as long as the question is less than 60 days old, after that migration is impossible), but on-topic questions should not be migrated.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 7, 2014 at 10:35
  • Ah OK, just that both Mark and myself came across the "blessed site" terminology but at least I didn't come across the "migration path" terminology. But now we know. Thanks.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 7, 2014 at 13:11

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