I think setting up a migration path may be a little premature.
I mentioned this to one of the Math.SE mods, who pointed out that we actually haven't been migrating questions to Math.SE. Without information on how a migration path would be used, it may be difficult to justify adding one. (I can't recall exactly when the last flag for migration was, but it was more than several months ago.)
Since the volume of candidate questions for migrations probably isn't that high to begin with, I'd suggest that we instead flag questions if they meet the migration criteria:
- They're not on topic for Puzzling. We don't want to migrate questions away if they're alright here, even if they might arguably be more on topic elsewhere.
- They're on-topic on Math.
- They're of genuinely high quality.
The general two rules are: don't migrate if it's alright where it is, and don't migrate crap.
A moderator can then take a look and migrate if need be. (Mods can migrate questions anywhere.)
This will allow everyone (on both sites; a new path is a two-way deal) to get a better sense for how a migration path would be used, as well as iron out any kinks in which questions should be migrated. It may be possible that migration volume stays low enough that a migration path isn't even needed, either, though I think that may be a discussion for a later time.
question_asker raises a good point, that people might not flag to migrate when a close option obviously covers their concerns. So, let's actually use that to try and get a sense of how a migration path would be used.
Here's a list of the questions since April 18th that were closed with this reason. I've added my personal opinion on whether these questions would be well-received; I don't claim that this is absolute truth, though.
Also note, what's high quality to us may not be high quality to another site; look at these questions from the perspective of a Math.SE user outside of the context of migration.
In other words, in the past two months, there have been no questions closed with this reason that are nominally eligible for migration. The quality bar for migration is pretty high, and these don't pass the target site's quality criteria.
Let's go back a bit farther, and cut out the negatively-scored questions, and just look at positively scored ones. That strips the list down quite a bit, though, and we definitely don't want people migrating our negatively-scored questions. (Starting with questions posted before April 18th, going back to March 25th.)
Looking this over, the issue with most of these questions is that, when we say "math-textbook-style problem," it would look on Math.SE like a poorly-asked homework problem. There are a couple issues with this:
- These questions don't often show a whole lot of effort. I'm cutting out the negatively scored questions, and there are still many questions in there that don't show requisite effort for migration. On our side, this low-effort nature often looks like two or three sentence problems, but on Math.SE's side, no work is shown, no attempt is made, and no context is given.
These questions are typically not asked by people in search of an actual answer, which means we'll run afoul of their quality standards. As an example, Math.SE currently has this custom close reason:
This question is missing context or other details: Please improve the question by providing additional context, which ideally includes your thoughts on the problem and any attempts you have made to solve it. This information helps others identify where you have difficulties and helps them write answers appropriate to your experience level.
These questions... wouldn't pass, almost universally.
- It's highly plausible that we'd end up migrating a whole lot of questions that really shouldn't be moved.
- From our side of things, the questions which do make good migration candidates are few and far between, and may not be voluminous to justify a migration path.
That being said, this doesn't have to be the ending point for discussion. If we can provide a list of questions that are off-topic here, and which we think would be well-received on Math.SE, I can ask someone from Math.SE to give feedback on whether they'd want those questions migrated. That, I think, might be the next place to go.