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At the moment, the only defined destination to which questions on Law.SE can be migrated is law Meta. Migration to any other destination requires special moderator intervention, as I understand things. Recently there3 have been several questions migrated to the Politics stack, and at least one Q migrated from Politics to Law. It seems to me that it would make sense to add a Politics destination to the community specific reasons menu. That way any person who has the right to VTC could directly specify a politics destination.

Here is a screenshot of migrations to and from law in the last 90 days:

Screenshot of migrations to and from law

As the above screen shot shows, there were 5 questions migrated from politics to law, and 5 from law to politics (albeit three were rejected) within the last 90 days. No other site had as many, and only one other site (FOS, which is Open Source.SE) occurred more than once as a destination. Is that enough to create a migration path to Politics?

It seems to me that it is likely that in future there will be questions not on topic here but which would be on topic in politics. In particular many "Why" questions would IMO fit better on Politics.

I am not sure of the exact procedure for making such an interface change. I gather it is done on a per-site basis.

Can we make such an addition? What is the detailed procedure?

Details of migrated questions

Here are links to questions which were migrated to Politics from Law and their status:

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  • 5 questions in 3 months is nothing, and not worth adding a migration path for.
    – user4657
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 20:47
  • Have added another example. Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 21:57
  • @Nij How many, roughly, would you think would justify a path? It might be that if there was a path this might cause migration to be suggested somewhat more often. Of course there is no way to be sure of that Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 22:04
  • 1/2. Suggesting migration to Politics requires that one knows migration is possible, that Politics is an existing site, that the question is off-topic here, and that it's likely to be on-topic there. Altogether that implies familiarity with Stack Exchange as a network and specifically of both sites. A user who knows all of that, and still doesn't flag for a moderator to migrate or enter a custom reason, or does so but the moderator does not move it, isn't going to recommend more migrations by having this pathway, and ...
    – user4657
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 22:14
  • 2/2 ... and moderators aren't going to migrate more questions by making this a reason for regular users, because moderators have migration ability to any site.
    – user4657
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 22:14
  • 1
    @Nij Seeing migration to Politics on the close menu could inform a user of some of those, and lead such a user to investigate the other conditions you mention. Indeed it was seeing such paths on other sites which has led me to recently flag several questions for such migrations. Again, i ask, how many migrations would seem to you to justify creating a path? Your argument above could apply even if there were 20 migrations a day (highly unlikely as that is) or so it seems to me. Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 22:41
  • At least one valid migration a day, and a rolling average rejection rate lower than both our own and the target site's overall closure rate.
    – user4657
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 23:53
  • @Nik Thank you. We certainly are not close to that. Commented Feb 20, 2021 at 1:58
  • At any rate, Law is by definition politically neutral. Politics is not- the sites are completely incompatible. Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 14:58
  • @Studoku But law often has political implications and vice versa. That is why it is not uncommon for questions posted on Law to be more appropriate on Politics, and for migration to be the right way to handle them. Look at the questions linked above. Don't you agree that migration was proper for those? Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 15:02
  • @DavidSiegel If someone asks here, chances are they want a non-partisan answer. I think we should respect that. Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 15:22
  • @Studoku when someone asks a "why is the law X?" question, except in those few cases where it can be answered via legal history, it must be moved to Politics or clsoed as off-topic. The first is better. Nor is all of the Politics stack partisan. Do you really think any of the 7 questions linked in the "details" section above should have been left open on Law? If so which and why? Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 15:33
  • Did the 60% rejection rate improve over time?
    – Mast
    Commented Nov 16, 2022 at 11:35
  • Per this page, there have been 10 migrations from Law to another site in the past 90 days; 5 of them were to this Law Meta site (though one of them was apparently rejected...?). There was 1 migration to OpenSource.SE that went through. 4 others – to Ask Patents, Travel, Worldbuilding, and Interpersonal Skills – were all rejected. (It looks like there were no migrations to Politics within the last 90 days.)
    – V2Blast
    Commented Nov 16, 2022 at 18:18

1 Answer 1

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There are so-called migration paths and not all sites have them; one of the footnotes in the FAQ about migration says this:

2 Not every site has selectable migration paths; in particular, beta sites, recently-graduated sites, and Meta Stack Exchange don't have any selectable sites (other than the site's per-site meta, if applicable, and vice versa). On such sites, only moderators can migrate questions out of that site (as they can choose any site to migrate to).

Law Stack Exchange isn't a beta site anymore, but it's not fully graduated either (e.g. the lack of a custom design, and a privilege reputation scheme that corresponds to beta sites).

There is some renewed discussion about migration paths on Meta Stack Exchange, e.g. here. I can imagine that if migration to Politics Stack Exchange occurs often (how often can be seen by looking at the migration statistics available to 2k users – perhaps you could post a screenshot), it makes sense to ask the Community Managers to add this particular migration path.

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  • I have added a screen shot and summarized the numbers from it in my question. Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 21:17
  • 1
    Thanks. IMHO, a 40% success rate is rather low, but I'm just a passer-by here.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 21:20
  • "a 40% success rate is rather low". That percentage suggests that streamlined migration is prone to misuse just like it is happening with VTCs. David himself recently pointed out the latter. Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 23:42
  • @Iñaki Viggers Unless I have misunderstood, all of those were done by mods, sine no streamlined migration paths have been created from LAW. Are you saying thst one should, or should not, be created from Law to politics? Of course, Migration, like anything else, is prone to error. Commented Feb 18, 2021 at 17:47
  • @DavidSiegel "all of those were done by mods". Got it. I didn't know. I don't really have a strong position on this question, but I tend to be against anything that sounds in making it easier to suppress others' content. I'm mindful that here you mean migrating as opposed to closing, but from our "local" standpoint it still amounts to suppression of questions even if it is not apparent to some "voters to migrate" that such questions actually are on topic for LawSE. My understanding is that reversing an unwarranted migration requires involvement of mods from both SE sites. Commented Feb 18, 2021 at 18:18
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    @Iñaki Viggers I don't generally approve of suppressing content myself, although some posts are inappropriate and should IMO be closed or deleted. But migrated posts continue to be shown on the site where they were first posted, with a link to the new location, and are also shown on the destination site, and so get exposed to more possible providers of answers. When there is a significantly better fit for another site, and the post is off-topic for the original site, I think migration is often a win-win solution. Details matter, of course. Commented Feb 18, 2021 at 18:45
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    Your understanding of migration is way off, InakiViggers. It places the question on the site where it is actually on-topic and there are users with the relevant knowledge to answer it. Rejecting unwarranted migration doesn't require mods at all, if the question is closed on the target site even by regular VTC, it gets rejected. And if it's not closed, clearly the migration was fine.
    – user4657
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 20:49

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