Would it be worth migrating questions to Writers.SE?

Question

Writing Stackexchange was set up as a public beta 8 years ago, and has pretty good stats. Apparently they can migrate to us:

migrated from writing.stackexchange.com 8 hours ago
This question came from our site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing.

I've seen a few questions with comments recommending migrating to Writers.

Is it worth having a migration option as a close vote option? Is there a basal rate of off-topic-here-but-on-topic-there questions? If so, what's the standard way of setting it up?

Answer 1

An important criterion for community migration paths is the level of migration that occurs already by moderator action.

There's no "right" level for establishing a migration path, but tens or hundreds of migrations with a single digit rejection rate seems safe. Single digit migrations in the last 90 days and/or rejection rates that can order a drink without ID are signs that the path will be a waste of time to establish.

Opening those migration paths is fraught, as sometimes low-quality questions that should be closed get migrated instead (a constant frustration already on the part of ELL.SE members), or questions that are answerable here get migrated unnecessarily. Moderators are expected to be more knowledgeable and careful than the community, on the whole, so if they do not deem many questions worth moving, there is no cause to throw that open to a wider constituency.

A SEDE query for questions migrated away turns up these results since the EL&U epoch:

Site Count Latest Migration ELL 3676 2019-08-23 13:00:32 Writers 166 2019-08-22 14:55:45 Linguistics 65 2019-07-01 03:07:07 SuperUser 21 2019-01-14 13:21:33 Philosophy 19 2019-01-23 17:11:37

(Writers.SE was renamed Writing.SE in January 2018, after several months of discussion; presumably some SEDE table needs updating. Literature is at #6, with 17, but I think that includes migrations from the failed 2011–12 incarnation as opposed to the currently constituted Lit.SE).

Since this is skewed somewhat by the age of the available targets (why else would we have more migrations to Mathematics.SE than to LanguageLearning.SE?), 10K users can also see the 90-day migration statistics:

Site Count Stats ELL 175 6% rejected Meta.ELU 12 16% rejected Writing 4

followed by eight singletons.

The migration rate to Writing is two orders of magnitude below that of ELL by either measure, which doesn't make a compelling case in my view, though of course I am just an ordinary community member with no larger insights.

If you come across questions that would be better-answered at Writing.SE, it sounds like we should step up our efforts to flag them and have moderators move them. The case for community-driven migration will be much stronger once we can demonstrate that adding that path will be beneficial for both communities.

Answer 2

This has been regularly discussed here over the years (e.g. here); the difference now is that, with Writers out of Beta, it is a practical possibility.

You will need to persuade the moderators here that we receive enough questions that are off-topic here but would be on-topic at Writers.SE to justify the work of setting up a migration path; you would also need to convince the mods at Writers.SE that we won't flood them with opinion-seeking, unclear or plain badly-written questions, but that should be comparatively easy. The best way forward would be to compile a list of fairly recent ELU questions that you think should be/have been transferred to Writers, and get a consensus of opinion. I suggest a community wiki question here as a starting point.

Once there is enough of a groundswell of opinion on ELU, our mods can put a request in to the Stack Exchange programmers to set up a migration route, and add it to the list of closevote options. "Enough" here means literally 'sufficient that the improvement to the SE network will be worth the time and trouble, and possible collateral problems'; nobody really knows how much that is, so just provide as much evidence as possible. It won't come as a surprise, at least.

I will add a note of caution; there actually was such a path for a short time, in 2011 as I recall. But Writers.SE did not then justify the hopes placed in it; it was reverted to Beta, and the path automatically ceased to exist. Transferring questions that are better there than here will improve both sites; but just offloading stuff we don't want is both discourteous and counter-productive.

Answer 3

Writers.SE welcomes the following types of question:

If you have questions about writing techniques, style, usability/readability, planning and organizing, research techniques, publishing, and related topics, your questions are welcome here.

• Non-fiction, technical, scholarly, journalistic, or professional blog writing, including the presentation of examples, charts, and diagrams.
• Writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.
• General copywriting, style, and organization.
• Questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits. (See this meta post for more information.)
• The publishing and editing process itself.
• Questions about specialized writing tools.

As per @TimLymington's suggestion, here is a list of questions that would be on-topic at Writers.SE, but are closed as off-topic here:

• How to refer to myself in a research paper? [closed], Apr 13 '16 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Proper citation style online [closed], Jan 27 '17 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Cite a Powerpoint Presentation [closed], Jun 6 '12 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Ibid source citing source [closed], Feb 25 '14 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Which one is the correct dialogue punctuation format? [closed], Mar 20 '15 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Is writing very long sentences which waste much of the reader's time reading it and understanding it's meaning a bad thing, or is it good? [closed], Sep 14 '14 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• When to use direct speech vs indirect speech in a story? [closed], Apr 7 '18 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• How to show people voicing their opinions in essays [closed], Oct 26 '14 - On topic under 'questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits.'
• MLA style: I need help citing an old article I found in a website [closed], May 20 '16 - On topic under 'general copywriting style and organisation'
• Has or Had / Past and Past Perfect [closed], Sep 6 '13 - On topic under 'Writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.'
• Can "forcibly" be used in an action that a person performs to himself/herself? [closed], Oct 13 '13 - On topic under 'questions asking for help expressing a concept or an idea, within limits.', and 'writing fiction, poetry, scripts, or song lyrics.'

_{I've used this data query to search for all comments with Writers.SE in them. This is a non-exhaustive list.}

Interestingly, almost all the users who asked the questions have >200 reputation. If we could redirect the questions to a place where they would be better received, there might be better user retention. The questions are fairly high quality, they just aren't what we do here.