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I am a moderator of expat.SE, and I am sorry that I have to ask this again. Last time I asked was in Jun 2021, but it just happened again.

Please can you check before migrating a question to expat.SE that the question has not already been asked there too? We just had an instance of the same question being asked in expat.SE and then not eight hours later someone from here migrated the exact same question to expat.SE, so it appeared as the TOP and SECOND questions on the site. Even just opening the expat.SE site before migrating would have shown the question right at the top.

Please can I ask you to check first?

Thanks

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Scott, welcome to Meta if our site and thank you for bringing this up.

According to the general etiquette of StackExchange, duplicate questions are not considered a big deal. I’ve closed over a thousand questions during my time on Travel.SE and it’s never been a major time sink. Additionally as a mod of Travel, I’m in a unique position of having read thousands of questions and can often tell if something is a duplicate without having to search for it. So overall I would argue that it should be up to the receiving site to close the question as a duplicate, taking their expertise as mods and power users of that local site. The sending site should only make sure the question is on topic.

Things might be different if we were sending hundreds of questions per month to each other but currently we send maybe 3-4 per week so it’s certainly manageable.

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    I would argue that mods have an added duty of care to ensure that they aren't migrating a duplicate question, and also that they aren't migrating a question that uses no tags on the destination site. Normal user migrations are prevented for such cases, but mod migrations are exempt from these checks. Mods should be aware if they're about to bypass a normal user check. Until such time as the team implements a warning to that effect, a mod should check for that.
    – gparyani
    Feb 25, 2022 at 21:36
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    @gparyani fully agreed for huge sites like StackOverflow/SuperUser, but not really important for Travel/Expats.
    – JonathanReez Mod
    Feb 25, 2022 at 21:41
  • Yeah, the reason why I'm concerned has more to do that if there are persistent complaints that we're migrating duplicates (this isn't the first time such a complaint was made in a year), it increases the chance that the team will ultimately deny the request to implement a normal user migration path. Even if the system checks for cross-posts when normal users vote to migrate making this only an issue for mod migrations, the team may see the complaints and deny the request.
    – gparyani
    Feb 25, 2022 at 21:44
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    @gparyani I like to think the SE admin team is reasonable. If they're not, our site is doomed anyway :-)
    – JonathanReez Mod
    Feb 25, 2022 at 21:46

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