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As a follow-up to Should we begin migrating questions to ELU?, (and counterpart to https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7128/should-we-have-a-migration-path-to-ell).

Now that ELL is a full-fledged non-beta site, we're allowed to establish official migration paths to other network sites. Should we have a real, close-vote-reason-enabled, migration path to ELU?

2 Answers 2

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No. Only moderators should be able to migrate between ELL and ELU.

As someone who as previously inquired "Why is our only migration option to "Migrate to meta"?", after coming to know the SE system better and the relationship between ELL and ELU more fully, I believe that having a default migration path would be a poor idea.

This is particularly a concern because ELL still has the lower (beta) reputation privileges (see "Phase One"), meaning migration paths would be available to a huge group of the user base, including users who don't necessarily understand the differences between the two sites.

In addition, the need for migration to ELU seems incredibly remote. Very few questions asked on ELL are off-topic here but on-topic on ELU.

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  • 1
    This. THIS. I first thought migration paths would be shiny, but I don't want a shiny sword with a rusty inside.
    – M.A.R.
    Sep 10, 2015 at 18:51
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    Here I was worried that the 3k requirement on ELU was too low (I completely unrealistically suggested Trusted User on both sites), and then I completely forgot that it still only takes 500 on ELL to vote-to-close! That makes me even less comfortable about an ELL-to-ELU path than I already am about vice versa.
    – tchrist
    Sep 10, 2015 at 18:58
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    I agree wholeheartedly. It's the same reason you can't migrate from StackOverflow to Programmers: too many questions that shouldn't be migrated will be. If we start getting a large, hard-to-handle volume of questions that belong on ELU we can revisit this (but even then I think it's more likely that the solution will be "elect more mods").
    – WendiKidd
    Sep 10, 2015 at 20:26
  • I wholeheartedly agree with this. It took eight months of my snarkiest rhetoric to convince people here that questioners should be allowed to ask what they wanted to know about instead of what ideologues felt they should want to know about; mechanical migration (especially before rep requirements go up) would mean starting that fight over from the beginning. Sep 10, 2015 at 23:06
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No

I agree with Catija, and here's why:

In the last 90 days, we have had one migration to EL&U. One.

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It's certainly possible that more questions have been flagged for migration and not migrated, but unless we have a flagging problem, it's unlikely to be a significant number of questions.

And as per When should we consider adding a default migration path?:

Almost never.

These paths have a place when two conditions exist:

  1. There is a clearly-defined topic that is wholly inappropriate on one site and wholly appropriate on another.
  2. That topic is asked about daily on the former site.

This is pretty rare. Especially if the first site isn't Stack Overflow.

... snip

Until then, I'd want to see a veritable deluge of good but blatantly off-topic questions on a site before I'd consider adding a migration path.

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