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A long time ago, on a site far, far away this site, the possibility of a migration path to the Movies & TV Stack Exchange was discussed.

If such a path was set up, it would mean that M&TV would be added as an option for migration for questions on the main SFF site on the same level as the option for migration to SFF meta, and thus five users with 3k+ reputation would be enough to migrate a question from here to M&TV. Currently any migration except to SFF meta requires moderator intervention.

The highest-voted answer there says:

This discussion the other day shows that some people, including high-rep users, aren't entirely on the same page regarding what should be migrated. It's clear that non-SF&F movies or shows should go. It's pretty well established, I think, that asking about a non-genre show or movie is probably fine if the question related to a genre-ish element within that movie, but having a bit of genre-ish content doesn't make a show SF&F automatically. But what that discussion seem to indicate is that non-genre questions are off-topic, even if they're in an explicitly on-topic show.

This, I think, is unclear to all. Is this the consensus opinion? Where exactly is the line drawn about non-SF&F elements in SF&F works?

Once we've established that, I think the migration path should be added.

A year and a half have passed since then, and much has changed both in SFF and in M&TV, so I'm reopening this discussion. There are two issues to be established here:

  • Do we now have a clear policy on when migration to M&TV is appropriate?

    If not, let's make one here!

  • If so, shall we set up a migration path?

(For what it's worth, M&TV had a similar discussion about migration to other sites, which is marked , indicating that they won't be adding any migration paths in the near future, but may do so at some point.)

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    Personally, I'd also argue that a prerequisite for a "migration path" is having a significant number of incoming questions that should have gone to the other site. Do we regularly get questions here that should be on M&TV? (and can we find links to specific examples?)
    – Ixrec
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 0:47
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    @Ixrec If my count is correct, in the history of SFF.SE we've had 69 questions migrated to M&TV and 16 with migration rejected.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 0:59
  • It might help to check questions closed as off topic to see if there are some that were closed but not migrated. I'd also be curious to know what the 16 rejected migrations were for.
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 14:53
  • @Catija Some (most?) of the rejected migrations were because the questions were outright bad (e.g. terrible story-ID) rather than because they were off-topic for M&TV. Unfortunately nearly all those questions have since been deleted - usually automatically by the Community bot - so they'd be 10k+ links only. As for checking questions closed as off-topic, I'm not yet familiar enough with the mod tools to know if there's a master list somewhere that's easy to search...
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 14:59
  • From the Tools on M&TV, I actually see about 90 questions sent to M&TV from SFF... with 19 closed or duped. Not certain why we're getting different numbers.
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 15:59
  • @Catija 69+16 is about 90, and 16 is close enough to 19, so it's possible I miscounted slightly. If a question is migrated and then dupe-closed, is the migration rejected? (I suspect not, and that migration is only rejected if the migrated question is closed for some other reason.) Also, if you can see these stats so easily even without being a mod, then there must be something I'm missing! :-)
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 16:05
  • I'm 10k on M&TV, so I have the mod tools. I didn't realize your numbers were exclusive. That would explain most of the number discrepancy.
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 16:09
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    It seems like we only migrate questions anywhere about once every two weeks or so. Most of our migrations are to our own meta. The volume doesn't seem to justify letting us regular users start all kinds of fights with other sites over migration.
    – Wad Cheber
    Commented Feb 20, 2016 at 5:49
  • For comparison, similar suggestions to this were recently(ish) made for a migration path from ELU to ELL, eventually accepted. Here are the meta.elu thread and the meta.ell thread. Our case here is obviously quite different (far fewer relevant questions), but relevant points were made in both those threads.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Feb 21, 2016 at 15:39

3 Answers 3

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Nah. Not only would automatic migration be a flashpoint for contention (nearly a quarter of mod-migrated question have ultimately been rejected, I can only assume the number would be higher if we allowed community migration) but there's simply very few questions that get asked on SFF:SE that need to be migrated, As user1027 pointed out, less than one or two every month.

The present system (flag it and let a mod sort it out) is both proportionate and appropriate. Adding migration paths just complicates matters unnecessarily.

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  • "nearly a quarter of mod-migrated question have ultimately been rejected", can we get stats with reasoning? To clear the context.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 5:52
  • @ankitsharma - Stats can be found in comments above.
    – Valorum
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 5:56
  • I though it will better to be included here as this one is accepted answer and should be bit detailed but never-mind it's your answer so decision will be your.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:06
  • @ankitsharma - As far as I'm aware, the number remains almost so low as to be meaningless
    – Valorum
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:08
  • I am not demanding here to set a migration path which is tricky because how will we going to make people understand the SE rule of "don't migrate crap". But it's always better to give clear stats when declarations has been made in post and i though you support stats. Anyways some slips made me wonder if its really that small no of migration requirement or we are missing where to really do it.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:13
  • @ankitsharma - Possibly. Mistakes do occasionally happen, but if the OP had cared enough to ask for a migration he/she would almost certainly have gotten it. The flipside, as you say, is that migration is such a rarity that 'crap migration' is far more likely to occur.
    – Valorum
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:20
  • I have seen migration without OP's approval from scifi too but that's other discussion.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:23
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There's really no need. In the last 90 days, we have not had a single question migrated to M&TV:

migration stats

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  • I noticed that too. But does this reflect that people are getting better at asking their questions on the right site, or is it just a temporary blip of few M&TV-migratable questions? (Or is it that there have been migratable questions and we've missed them for some reason?)
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Feb 15, 2016 at 23:36
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    The primary reason for a migration path is that the volume of migrations becomes a strain on mods' time. It would have to be quite the statistical anomaly for MTV migrations to go from that high to zero over 3 months.
    – Kevin Mod
    Commented Feb 15, 2016 at 23:41
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This data.SE query shows how many questions have been migrated away from this site that have never been closed on the target site. Movies & TV is by far the most common target for successful migration:

Site          Count Latest Migration 
------------- ----- ---------------- 
Movies        72    2016-03-22 15:09:53
English       8     2016-02-02 15:49:22
Physics       8     2015-02-19 04:47:56
Worldbuilding 7     2016-03-22 17:04:56
Gaming        5     2016-01-27 19:18:48
History       3     2015-06-04 13:09:18
Writers       3     2014-01-06 19:38:15
Anime         2     2015-06-08 00:29:30
Space         2     2013-07-29 16:59:30
Astronomy     1     2014-07-09 14:38:49
Biology       1     2013-05-12 12:40:15
Boardgames    1     2012-08-20 21:29:07
Earthscience  1     2014-10-02 18:21:23
Graphicdesign 1     2014-01-27 22:46:46
Hermeneutics  1     2012-04-10 21:32:38
Linguistics   1     2016-03-17 21:51:14
Mythology     1     2016-03-14 15:27:09
Security      1     2012-01-25 21:45:33
Travel        1     2012-10-04 21:05:20

The other answers have already shown that a Movies & TV migration path isn't needed right now, but if we ever add a migration path to anywhere, Movies & TV would be the site to add. But from the numbers above, we've had only 1.3 successful migrations to Movies & TV per month over that site's lifetime.

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    I excluded meta sites from the query. Some questions have been migrated to meta.scifi, but presumably not any other meta sites.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented Apr 15, 2016 at 5:32
  • And meta.scifi already has its own migration path anyway; it doesn't need a mod to migrate questions there.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Apr 15, 2016 at 11:28
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    One a month doesn't seem to justify doing anything else. I vote that we revisit this in 24 months time and see if anything has substantially changed.
    – Valorum
    Commented Apr 15, 2016 at 11:38
  • Now we've migrated a question to rpg.SE too.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 16:42

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