Policy on migrating questions from another StackExchange site?

Question

In the recent days there has been a (thankfully) small trickle of questions migrated from Stack Overflow.

Here are two that I stumbled upon, probably there are more:

• How does one insert a backslash or a tilde into LaTeX?
• What is the difference between “Page Break” and “New Page”?

To be honest, I'm a bit unsure why these have been migrated here. They both seem to have good and accepted answers, although some responses are of dubious value at best, and are of the answers-should-be-comments, or not-really-an-answer variety.

Incidentally, the second question has already been asked and answered here in the olden days of TeX.SE:

\pagebreak vs \newpage

I'm not even going to discuss the reputation these questions have accumulated, that would be another question entirely.

What I'm asking is really summarized in the title, but here are a few more points:

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• What is the policy on migrating questions from other StackExchange sites, particularly related to Tex.SE?
• Why old and answered questions are migrated here, when the original inquirer is long gone, and we have better alternatives?
• Are we going to see this continuing in the future, and if yes, is this a Good Thing (tm)?

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Perhaps I'm missing the point of migration, but I always thought it should be for (challenging) questions that are better answered somewhere else, not when they already have good and accepted answers.

Answer 1

Questions should only be migrated if they are off topic. If the question would benefit from the input on another site, better, I think, to ask the question there again. Remember that the person who asked the question may not be interested in this site outside of that question, not have an account, &c., and there are SO participants knowledgeable about Tex&c who are not active here.

Existing discussion

Migration and the on/off-topic question has been discussed on meta.SO:

• Can we have a ruling on LaTeX on Stack Overflow? - which counts as a sort of plebiscite saying questions about writing Latex are on topic for SO
• Can SO questions on TeX be migrated to tex.SX?
• Should we migrate old questions to new SE sites?, where Grace Note observes "remember that migration is primarily a tool to move questions that don't belong on the current site, not to move them to the more appropriate site"

and meta.SU:

• Are TeX/LaTeX questions off-topic?

Recommendation

Re-ask the questions, or link to existing equivalents, and make sure each question links to the other. Again, only migrate questions that are off topic where they are now.

Answer 2

Generally I don't think it is going to be a big problem, as long as we do some cleanup. It would probably be useful if mods/high rep users get notified of migrated questions in order to do that.

If the questions are duplicates, we should simply mark them as such (in the present case it is a bit hard to tell which question is a duplicate of which, as marking the newly migrated question as a duplicate of the old one, will make them reference each other in a circle).

If there are bad answers or comments, or comments that do not fit anymore after migration, they should be mercilessly deleted.

If the questions are badly written (or written with a different audience in mind), we should simply rewrite them. Same goes for answers. Especially if the posters aren't TeX.SX users, that won't hurt anyone and might even give us good questions/answers.

Answer 3

I can only say that I also find it rather strange that these old questions with no recent activity are migrated here; in fact, I mentioned the issue in this question on meta. It's good that you're bringing it up as an issue of its own, but I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about it. So I can only answer the last question: I fear that we'll continue to see this, and no, it's not a Good Thing.

Answer 4

I concur with Caramdir that notifying mods/high rep users of newly migrated questions would be useful - not only because there may be duplicate questions or badly written questions/answers, but because nearly every migrated question will have to be retagged. (I myself have removed the latex tag from such questions at least two times.)

Answer 5

Speaking as a new participant, for purposes of doing research, it would be helpful to have all TeX questions on the same sub-site or sub-domain. So yes, migration is good, and it's helpful to have a record of answered questions for the long term, even when those questions may have later and better answers.

I was surprised when my initial TeX question to stackoverflow was migrated here. Since this site exists, migration makes sense, of course, but in that case I'm puzzled as to why all the older TeX questions on the same site have not also been migrated.

When I search google using the site: tag, all site:stackexchange.com entries can be searched together, but when two separate domains are involved, a combined search query is not always effective if there are a large number of hits. For instance,

`(site:stackexchange.com OR site:stackoverflow.com) xetex`

seems to prefer stackexchange matter;

`site:(stackexchange.com OR stackoverflow.com) xetex`

seems to prefer stackoverflow.com material.