Migration path to Workplace?

Question

Workplace has been officially graduated: new site design has no "beta" anymore, and privileges are set to the level of graduated sites.

This makes it possible to add this site to our migration path, does it make sense to do?

To better understand this, I would like to learn stats / rates of successful and rejected migrations to Workplace. I also would like to compare these against successful and rejected migrations to our long established target site - Stack Overflow.

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For your convenience, below is a list of some prior meta discussions related to Workplace migrations:

• Closing questions that should go to Workplace
• Should we mention The Workplace in our FAQ?
• How should we guide questions toward The Workplace?
• Should a list be assembled for migration to the Workplace once it opens?
• The Workplace is now in the commitment phase

• yannis: The migration stats (10K+ link) don't look very good: 33% rejected.
• gnat: thanks @YannisRizos - compared to only 10% rejection reported there for SO, that makes me feel we better abstain of adding migration path for TWP
• maple_shaft: @gnat I agree with this assessment. I wouldn't feel comfortable taking Workplace migrations out of the moderators hands right now. Perhaps if it only presented itself as a valid migration path for users who are high reputation to the target site?
• gnat: @maple_shaft it looks we better keep it manual for a while, at least until rejection stats improve. Regarding opening migration path for users with high target rep, this feature seems to be officially declined
• Bart van Ingen Schenau: If 33% is bad, how about the migrations from programmers to here? That is also at 33% rejected. (Food for thought)
• gnat: @BartvanIngenSchenau good catch, numbers behind percents are: in the last 90 days, 6 of total 18 migrations to Workplace were rejected (for migrations between main and meta Programmers, same 33% mean 2 rejected migrations of total 6:)

Answer 1

I'd like (and have asked for) mods on both sites to chime in, but this isn't looking like a good idea at this point.

Stats are pretty clear, 52% of all moderator initiated migrations from PSE to The Workplace (as obtained on The Workplace) have been rejected. That's moderator initiated, which often entails a bit of collaboration and sanity checking with the mods at TW. Or, basically, being as careful as one can be not to send over something likely to just be closed.

I don't think opening up a migration path would fare much better, probably a bit worse. In theory this sounds like a good idea because you do have overlap when it comes to the types of career oriented questions that PSE doesn't really want - but that's icky.

For now, I'd rather that those questions just continue to be closed here as warranted, and leave it in the hands of the moderators on both sites to migrate the occasional gem that might have a better chance there. Even then, historically, we only get that right half of the time.

I'm declining it for now, but I'm open to revisit later down the road.

• enderland: Is there a separate place this "sanity checking" happens other than the Workplace chat? I rarely see this and am way too frequently in chat - I assume there is a different chat channel this happens in?
• jmort253: @enderland - Some Programmers mods ask in the main moderator chat room. However, I either decline ones I know would just be closed or, if I'm in doubt, I post a link in the Water Cooler to "feel it out" first.
• Nicole: I agree with this. I feel it's similar to the problem Programmers had with the SO->Programmers migration channel.

Answer 2

I'm with Tim on this.

We haven't had a good record when it's come to migrations to The Workplace and opening it up to more people is only going to make it worse.

Part of the problem is that the questions that could be sent really aren't good questions full stop. This is actually a problem with most sites on the network. People see the topic and think "that's off topic here but would be on topic there". What people should be looking at is the quality of the question when it comes to migration.

Yes, the first question should be the "is it on topic here?", but that where you should initially stop. If you've determined that it's off topic you should then ask "is it of high enough quality to migrate to there?" and only then vote/flag for migration.

Hmm - I've just had a thought. Perhaps there should be a way to migrate closed questions in one step rather than having to reopen and then migration. I'll think on this.

• gnat: "a way to migrate closed questions in one step rather than having to reopen and then migration" -- that's an interesting idea. After all, reopening a post that has already been decided as off-topic (at source site) makes no sense - it being on-topic on target site should not play role here
• ChrisF: @gnat - Migrating closed questions has already been suggested on Meta Stack Overflow. No official answer as yet.
• user131: You know, while splitting sound and video SE, I wished for a way to just migrate a closed question instead of reopening it, then migrating it, but I stopped short of asking for it when I realized how extraordinarily rarely I'd actually make use of it. If it was an every day thing, I'd be all in favor of eliminating a step.
• ChrisF: @TimPost - Shog basically said the same thing on the question that's been closed as a dupe of the one I linked to. While it would be nice, it would probably only get used once or twice a week - at most - and that's network wide.
• enderland: I think the main problem is that there seems to be the assumption "question is about career/office, migrate to Workplace!" which shows up in a lot of questions which lead me scratching my head. Most of the ones which I see that are not duplicate rejections are pretty clearly not good questions if you read them. I say this because P.SE and Workplace have similar question quality requirements to avoid discussion or "what do y'all think!!!" questions.
• jmac: The 4 questions you should ask before deciding what to do with a question are: (1) is it a good question? (not unclear, too broad, a duplicate, or opinion-based) (2) can it be made a good question through an edit? (3) is it on-topic for this site? (4) is it on-topic for another SE site? -- if you answer no to 1 and 2, it can be unceremoniously closed. If it is yes to (1) or no-yes to (1) (2), then the answer to (3) or (4) will determine if it should be edited, edited and migrated, or closed as off-topic. But yeah, sending poor questions for the common close reasons is not a good idea.

Answer 3

This is the best solution right now - http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3060/the-water-cooler

This is almost always very active and almost always within 24 hours (excluding weekends, somewhat). There are a few people who currently either drop questions in there which is great, but if there are frequent moderator questions about "should this go to Workplace?" they are only initiated there by Yannis. I don't know of any other programmer mod who has put a question there asking, "should we migrate this?" In fact, I'm not sure I could identify who the majority of P.SE mods are - if there is this loop currently I'm completely out of it. I know of a few who've asked me questions but if there are more than WorldEngineer and Yannis, I have no idea (at least as applies to "should this be migrated to Workplace" questions).

I would say this is your best bet right now. I hangout in your chat a fair bit too and frequently give insight into the questions some of P.SE regulars (but generally not mods) ask me about.

I'd be shocked if the rejection rate of questions that either get put in the Workplace chat or when I get pinged in the P.SE chat is very high at all and most of those would likely be duplicates. I will sometimes even edit questions which are "good but requires work before migration."

It's questions which bypass this process which get rejected.

• user53019: Have a look at: programmers.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators. You know more of the Progs mods than you realize. :-) Mods often use the mod-only private chat room to ask about migrating a question. That said, dropping a link in the Water Cooler is a good suggestion. Have you considered running for TW mod? It would be great if we had a TW mod in The Whiteboard on a regular basis... it would save us all that effort of entering another chat room.
• enderland: @GlenH7 ahhh! So there is a batcave which (maybe) is being used...
• yannis: @enderland Not only there is a batcave, we also have a batsignal (a special ping that goes to all a site's moderators, so we can call and ask them about a migration, etc). It's extremely useful and amazingly annoying at the same time.