Does ELL migrate questions to ELU?

Question

So, following on from Attracting new and interesting questions in 2018, I may have a theory, but I don’t have the necessary knowledge to figure out if it’s correct or not.

The theory is that "interesting questions" are slowly migrating naturally to ELL.

I fear that every time I comment with "you might find more resources on ELL" or "try asking this on ELL", I’m not just pointing a mere beginner to ELL, I’m migrating a potential strong user there. Everyone was a beginner once, and most (?) beginners will shy away from being told they’re wrong on their first forum post. So I’ve redirected a potential to ELL and there they stay, gaining competence in English, asking interesting questions, comfortable in the knowledge that they won’t be told they’re too much of a noob on that site. And nobody ever says "hey, this is a decent question, you should post it where the linguists hang out". Also, rather than redirect, the linguists there will simply answer the question, because it’s less effort, the user gets an answer, everyone is happy.

If the flow is mainly in one direction, there’s a chance ELU will wither. But I’m not familiar enough with ELL to know if that’s the case or not.

So, is the flow in one direction? Are there stats to show migrations? Or anecdata from users? Should I carry on redirecting, even though I fear I’m partially responsible for a brain drain to ELL? Or should I just spend time there to discover I’m mistaken?

Answer 1

TL;DR

The bottom line is migrations, in either direction, are relatively rare, and consequently don't have an impact on the bottom line. Furthermore, a net migration of questions from EL&U to ELL was always expected, and intended, and will remain the pattern as ELL matures¹.

The plural of anecdote

That said, empirical analysis is always nice, even if it's only to set our minds at ease. With that in mind, I threw together this SEDE query.

Here are the results, broken down by quarter, of questions migrated from here to ELL and vice-versa.

The first thing you'll notice is that your instincts are correct: there indeed has been a recent trend of net migration away from ELU to ELL. But there are two important caveats.

Peanuts

For the first, let's look at the data tabularly, as it's hard to get a solid, immediate sense of scale from the chart. I'll only post the last 3 years this way; the table gets too long otherwise, and data before that is less relevant, which we'll come back to in the second caveat.

Focus on the last column, the number of questions we "lost" to ELL.

+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|CalendarQuarter|Departing|Arriving|NetDepartures|  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY18Q4         |35       |1       |34           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY18Q3         |22       |0       |22           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY18Q1         |13       |0       |13           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY17Q4         |10       |0       |10           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY17Q3         |9        |0       |9            |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY17Q2         |2        |4       |-2           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY17Q1         |10       |0       |10           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY16Q4         |12       |2       |10           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY16Q3         |14       |1       |13           |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY16Q2         |6        |3       |3            |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+  
|FY16Q1         |6        |0       |6            |  
+---------------+---------+--------+-------------+    

Note that the order of magnitude is 10. Over the course of a quarter; that's 90 days. To put that in perspective, EL&U gets an average of 54 questions per day. Even the highest "loss" quarter, the one we're in, we only migrated 34 questions to ELL. That's about one every 3 days, or about 0.7% of all the questions.

That's not a lot.

Peanut Gallery

But, you reasonably ask, isn't it alarming that the trend is indeed increasing? Ah, this brings us to our second caveat.

It was always envisioned to work this way. Before ELL was set up, the EL&U community realized it had a problem: trying to serve two separate audiences with two distinct sets of needs. We had questions from the nominal audience (linguists, etymologists, and English-language enthusiasts), and even more questions from another audience (people learning English as a second language).

They didn't mix well; it made the people in the first audience grumpy, and people in the second audience frustrated. Thus, ELL was born.

But it takes time to start, build, and establish a site. Rome wasn't built in a day. So while ELL was cutting its teeth, ELU still received dozens of questions a day from the audience we hadn't yet totally migrated to ELL. Now that ELL is mature, more of that is happening.

The hope is, over time, Google results and other organic forces will eventually result in ELL-style questions being asked on ELL from the get-go (and, likely, we're going to have to make some additional, less organic adjustments¹).

But until that Halcyon day, we'll continue to receive these questions, and continue migrate them. That's all. This is to be expected².

Silver Lining

However, if it still worries you, maybe you can be consoled by another fact. If you remove the WHERE mSite=N'ell' from the SQL query above -- that is, count up migrations to and from the entire network -- over the last 3 years, we've been gaining about 8 questions every quarter.

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¹ _{However, organic changes as ELL matures will likely not be sufficient to totally shift the ELL-asking population to asking on ELL in the first instance. This is because there are several strong signals to Google and other entry points to StackExchange that EL&U is the right place to ask these questions.}

_{These include the body of such questions already existing here -- ironically, to fix that, we need to increase the number of migrations we make to ELL -- but also things like our canonical URL being english.stackexchange.com.}

_{Having said all that, all this goes to decreasing the number of "ELL-style" questions on the site. But that does not, of course, help us increase the number of EL&U questions. We need a seperate remedy for that.}

² _{Contrariwise, it's not to be expected than an ELL user, intentionally posting on ELL, frequently asks a question that requires the expertise of ELU.}

_{And if and when that happens, I wouldn't begrudge the ELL community keeping it, should they decide to do that. The answering community there are also experts in English, and I'm sure they like a meaty question now and again to sink their teeth into.}

Answer 2

Looking at the stats (10k+ link), two questions were migrated here from ELL in the last 90 days:

• How did 'by' semantically shift to denote 'succession'?
• Why use singular they? Why not make a new word to distinguish its meaning? (migration rejected and Q deleted; 10k+ link)

In contrast, 205 questions were migrated to ELL from here (12% rejected) in the last 90 days. I'm not going to list these :P, but you can probably find most of them via search.

ELU users can vote to migrate questions to ELL but ELL users can't migrate questions to ELU. So, it is necessary for a moderator to do the migration. It was suggested in 2015 for there to be a migration path from ELL to ELU but nothing happened and I doubt this would change since they don't grant such requests unless there are lots of questions being migrated by moderators.

If you see a question that's not yet 60 days old that you think belongs on ELU, you can flag it for moderator attention requesting it to be migrated here. Make sure that that the question is actually off-topic for the site it's currently on.

It's also worth thinking about sites other than ELL that might have questions that are worth taking. I'm not aware of any that have a significant number, unfortunately. (Except perhaps Writing, but I think the mods there are already doing a good job at migrating things, giving us 15 questions, although 40% was rejected, in the past 90 days.) I do know that History has a few English questions that they've closed but not migrated but I'm not sure if they're too old or not.

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I made an SEDE query that can find undeleted migrated questions from a specific site. Here's the query for questions that were migrated from ELU to ELL. Here's the same query for ELL to ELU.