Problematic migrations to ELL (an ongoing thing)

Question

Why does ELU keep migrating this type of question? Are they too cowardly to close them?

A recurrent issue on ELL. It's like we are the poor relation that can have the awful questions dumped on us.

See Is "to pursue indepence" correct?

Answer 1

What was so bad about the question?
Why couldn't it have been useful for learners?

The author recently self-deleted their question but for the benefit of those with less than 10k rep, who cannot see deleted posts, here is the ELL version reproduced below.

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I've heard the term independence usually in combination with the following words:

• to strive for independence

• to fight for independence

• to struggle for...

But is it also possible to say (I know it's probably not very common)

• to pursue independence

Why did the author delete their question?

Maybe the comment beneath their post was unfriendly?

Why does ELL keep migrating this type of question? Are they too cowardly to close them?

Or maybe it was the suggested edit left by an EL&U contributor whose ELL rep is low but who still ought to know better. Maybe that was the final straw? The bolding belongs to the editor:

I'm guessing you mean to use the term "independence, not "indepence".

The summary says: “Fix spelling.” But it didn't, the misspellings were untouched. In my opinion, the comment belittled the user's typos.

I visited the suggested edit queue and rejected the edit, as I hope any user in my place would have done, and actually fixed the two typos, one in the title and in the opening sentence.

The edit was quick and painless, and improved the legibility of the post. It's worth bearing in mind that the OP had spelt independence correctly three times.

I've seen much worse low-quality questions migrated to ELL, this was not one of them.

Answer 2

As Mari-lou says, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the question. It is about a central theme for English language learners: collocation.

It always sounds a bit annoying when a user asks if something which is correct is correct. For some reason it doesn't irritate at all when they are wrong, but how would they know?

Collocation is about the fact that we can say things like:

• make a cake
• make a mistake
• make an effort
• make a model
• do a course
• do the dinner
• do judo

but not for some reason

• *make a party
• *do a party

Why not? Who knows! What we say usually is 'they don't collocate.' There may be some useful generalisations we can make here for language learners in an answer though.

So "Can we say 'X a party'?" is a good question, even if the answer is "Yes". A good answer will have a bit more to say. And lots of people who have the same question are likely to get directed to the site.

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To do the Original Poster of the question under consideration due justice consider the following:

You can say:

1. Pursue an avenue

But you cannot generally say:

2. *Pursue a road

Go figure!

Answer 3

One reason that this is a recurring issue may be that the system itself is not (and perhaps cannot be) structured to produce results that both EL&U question reviewers and ELL question reviewers deem satisfactory. Although the ability of EL&U reviewers to determine what is and what is not a suitable question for their own site is far from perfect (as is evident from the number of questions that get reopened after initially being closed), at least EL&U reviewers have some idea—based on fairly extensive exposure to EL&U questions—about what sorts of questions are a reasonable fit at this site.

But it's one thing to think, "That question seems too basic for EL&U," and quite another to think, "That question seems like a good fit for ELL." Unless an EL&U reviewer has spent a fair amount of time on ELL, that person's notion of what is appropriate for ELL is likely to be extremely vague and subjective. I have no doubt that this shortcoming contributes to a tendency on the part of some EL&U question reviewers to migrate questions to ELL that (as it turns out) ELL reviewers don't want.

As I see it, however, this isn't evidence that EL&U reviewers are reflexively sending ELL garbage questions instead of just throwing them away on this site; after all, it's objectively no harder to close a question than to transfer it. Instead, I think that these migrations happen because (1) many EL&U reviewers do not have a clear idea of what ELL's standards are, (2) those EL&U reviewers encounter a question that they are confident is too basic to be suitable for EL&U, and yet (3) they don't want to send the question poster off to oblivion empty-handed, so (4) they either (a) vote to close the question but try to answer it in a comment or (b) vote to migrate the question to ELL, with some notion that the question may be welcome there.

If EL&U reviewers had a clearer idea of what constitutes an awful question under ELL criteria, they would probably be less prone to mistake a too-basic-for-EL&U question that ELL reviewers don't want from a too-basic-for-EL&U question that ELL reviewers might be happy to receive. But as I noted earlier, EL&U reviewers can't agree on whether a substantial number of questions posted on their own site should be open—so the idea that they would be able to apply another, less familiar site's criteria in an informed and systematic way, if only they would try harder to do so, strikes me as extremely wishful thinking.

I have spent very little time at ELL over the years that I have been a Stack Exchange participant, and I feel almost entirely unqualified to judge whether a too-basic question that is a poor fit for a site geared to English language experts and enthusiasts might nevertheless be a good fit at ELL. In part for that reason, and in part because I don't like being yelled at for throwing trash in a neighbor's yard, I almost never vote to migrate questions to ELL. Instead, when presented with a too-basic-for-EL&U question, I usually either skip the question or pursue option 4(a) above: answer the question briefly in a comment, and either vote to close or leave the determination of whether closure or migration is the more suitable action to other, better-informed reviewers.

I suspect that one major reason for establishing a migration path between Stack Exchange sites in the first place was to keep questions that might be of interest to readers in some part of the Stack Exchange network within the network, instead of having them die without further ado if asked at the wrong site. Another strong impetus may have been to help build traffic to less-established Stack Exchange sites from better-established ones. There is certainly no reason that Stack Exchange couldn't get rid of the automated migrate option for question reviewers and set up in its place a note saying, "Although reviewers have voted to close your question on this site, it might receive a better welcome at _________, another Stack Exchange site. If you are willing to risk rejection a second time, please consider posting your question there."

The fundamental question, to my mind, isn't, "How can we [reviewers at ELL] get EL&U reviewers to stop migrating to ELL questions that we consider inappropriate for our site?"—because EL&U reviewers aren't informed enough, consistent enough, or unified enough to meet that standard. Rather, the fundamental question that I suggest you ask is, "Is it worth it, on balance, to have a migration channel from EL&U to ELL, or should we get rid of it?"

Obtaining an accurate answer to that question would entail looking at the migrated questions from EL&U that you do like (assuming that there are any) and weighing the benefit of receiving those against the cost of the inevitable flow of questions that you consider awful or useless or merely a bad fit. If this assessment leads you to conclude that the migration channel from EL&U is a net negative for ELL—despite all previous efforts by ELL reviewers to get EL&U reviewers to do a better job of figuring out which ones to migrate—it would make sense to redirect your energies toward removing that channel from operation. If the assessment leads you to conclude that the channel is a net positive for ELL, you can take that positive into account in articulating your overall perspective of the relationship between ELL and EL&U.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with sending reminders to EL&U reviewers on EL&U Meta (as ELL reviewers fairly frequently do) that EL&U should not use migration to ELL as a convenient (or quasi-convenient) dispose-all. But such messages are likely to meet a better reception among EL&U question reviewers if they assume that the vast majority of those reviewers are motivated by good intentions, rather than implying that they are simply trying to dump their garbage in someone else's landfill.

Answer 4

For those who are looking for more examples, I tweaked an SEDE query to look at questions migrated from ELU TO ELL. It's much better for looking at questions that were well-received than those which weren't, because after a while the poorly received ones are deleted. Here's the worst received migrations from the beginning of the year:

Half year, half years, half a year?

Good or better is right [closed]

Articles before the nouns in specific cases

I think if you fiddle around with the query a bit, you'll see that the appreciated or neutral questions far out-number the stinkers. It's easy to get frustrated when you see a question you believe is poor quality get migrated, but I honestly believe ELU close voters aren't just dumping their bad questions on ELL. It's actually slightly more work to do that than to just close it on ELU.

However, I think it would be useful for ELU reviewers to look over the migrated questions that were well-received to get a better idea of the sorts of questions that do well on ELL after they're migrated.

There are a lot of tricky bits that mean the results of the query require interpretation and shouldn’t be used as a metric. For example, it won’t show older closed questions because the migration stub gets deleted some time after the migration has been rejected. However, it’s possible for a question to survive the first close attempt and be closed later and not be returned: https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/76180/timeline