Some people on SciFi.SE seem willing to accept identification request and is asking on their meta if the community wants.
As for now, we don't have the option to properly migrate them. Should we migrate science fiction and fantasy related identification requests to SciFi.SE?
If SF&F wants these questions (god knows why they would), I am happy to kick any new ones we get that are sufficiently science-fictional or fantastical over to them.
I do not support opening a formal migration path (i.e. making SF&F a migration target available to non-moderator close-voters) at this time. For the time being, it would be better for migration candidates to be identified in the following ways:
If this works, we can then work on opening a formal migration path and encouraging non-moderator close-voters to directly migrate without need for moderator intervention.
I do have some concerns about this. Chief among them is SF&F's requirement that the identification request "Appears to contain a uniquely identifiable question". This is a nebulous and ill-defined requirement. We have had various debates about similar requirements on this site (back before we'd banned id-reqs altogether), and my stance has always been that one simply cannot know (in the vast majority of cases) whether the text of an id-req uniquely identifies a single work. I will make a good-faith attempt to guess whether a question uniquely identifies a single work (or whether such information could be coaxed out of the asker with nominal effort), but it is entirely possible that my sense will not align with SF&F's voters' senses and we will get a lot of rejected migrations as a result.
Also, to be blunt, our id-reqs have historically been substantially lower-quality than SF&F's and you're probably not going to like them once they start appearing on your site. Doubly so, given that the id-reqs we get these days are exclusively from people who have no presence on this site and have not read any of the site rules, and hence are probably not inclined towards putting substantial effort into their questions.
But anyway, tl;dr: my take is that users should cast custom flags for migration, and we'll look at them. (Not starting immediately, though; we should wait a bit for our two metas to settle into a consensus. We moderators are also discussing this matter amongst ourselves [as, at least initially, it would be us upon whom the burden of this migration stuff would fall].)
I do not think we we should. I see no benefit at all in a migration path. It just puts more effort on the moderation staff to handle all the things, as regardless of infrequently as these questions occur. As many have mentioned in the comments, it puts lot of unnecessary burden on the moderation staff.
If people are adamant about this happening, I'd suggest for certain conditions for migration. If SFF.SE wants our identification-type questions that fit their criteria, they will need to establish a set of clearly definable criteria and actively request questions for migration on a case by case basis. It is not the responsibility if the moderation staff to actively monitor and migrate these questions.
If users from the other communities would like our off-topic questions, they should make an attempt to participate in our community for them. If we wanted something similar from their community, I would ask for the same amount of participation from our users.
The moderators have dealt with these questions for almost 3 years and a quite weary of them. We're familiar with how a vast majority of the question are not very comprehensible or sometimes even relevant to anime.
We allow questions on the topic of hentai, as long as it does not involve explicit material or details (yes, it gets tricky to draw the line, but we manage), as it violates the content policy. Without a set criteria it's hard to say what works and what doesn't. Different communities do things differently after all. How some users define "fantasy" is questionably subjective in my opinion. Talking animals doing human like thing can be considered "fantasy-like", while something setting like Charlotte's Web might not. Ambiguity and subjectivity will just more difficult for everyone in the long run.
The Stack Exchange community works the way it does thanks to it's community and users. If there is a set criteria to match questions appropriate for migration, I don't see the problem with it, if community pitches in to help.
Additionally, there is no merit in the migration of historically locked questions. The whole reason they are locked and not completely deleted is to reminded users of the deprecated nature of these question.
Just gonna leave a couple of thoughts here.
First, it doesn't seem reasonable to me for this community and its mods to have to take the burden of quality controlling these questions for another community, since they've been considered off-topic here. If SF&F found a way to make it work for them, awesome — but it shouldn't be expected for this community to go around and make sure questions check all the boxes in SF&F's quality guidelines for these types of questions.
It would also be unreasonable, however, to just migrate everything wholesale there, since most of the id-req stuff that gets posted here is low-quality (one of the reasons we ended up doing away with 'em).
Both of those reasons seem like pretty good reasons not to enable the migration path, to me.
Now, that being said, I do know that there's some overlap between users of both communities... so if anyone who is really active at SF&F and familiar with their guidelines sees something here they definitely think is a good fit there, great! Leave a comment suggesting the asker re-post their question on SF&F (and delete the one they posted here).
As Hakase mentions, you can always follow our bot in the main chat room, and drop some guidance when something interesting that'd be a good fit on SF&F is found.
This way, the question isn't orphaned: if the asker cares enough to join a new site and re-ask it, they probably also care enough to stick around and respond to clarifications, add necessary details, accept a correct answer if one arises...
And if they're already gone, no additional work is needed - we can just neatly leave it in our curb until the garbage man comes by... that is, the community deletes it.
Richard mentions we delete these new questions too quickly for anyone to react, though. Well... that's great, to be honest! Because it means we clean up our front page real quick :) But, to the point of this discussion: the close reason can always be slightly edited, so it gently points these users to SF&F — I don't think it'd make everyone who asks these questions here go there, but some of the most attentive ones might... and hopefully that's the subset of people who ask better quality id-reqs? IT could, however, have the exact same result as dumping all of these questions on SF&F, so I'm not so sure it'd be a great idea.
The proposal is reasonable on paper but unrealistic in terms of grounds for execution.
The benefits are too small for Anime.SE - which already banned this type of questions after having dealt with them for long enough to identify it as problematic - to be worth the effort.
The questions in concern are not dire for migration - If a question is closed but meets the standards for Sci-Fi, the question askers can already be manually redirected as-is.
Handling identification requests to decide if they're worth migrating shouldn't be the problem of that of our moderators and/or reviewers. However, the linked discussion thread on Sci-Fi.Meta.SE includes the following points:
Anime's own users and mods will do some quality control for us, ensuring that inappropriate questions (such as those that don't contain any SFF content) won't get migrated over.
We've had a TON of migration discussions on SO, and they inevitably break down because the target site gets a lot of rejected migrations. Invariably, what will happen is it will promote the lowest common denominator. "Oh, a story ID question. Off to SFF you go!", only to have us now do more work to close the ones not in the rules.
if ID questions are getting closed over there that would be upvoted and answered over here, then there's no reason not to deprive those questions' OPs of getting their answers.
These quotes outline the two main problems behind the migration option:
It is an idealistic implementation with the hopes that our users can identify questions that are worth Sci-Fi.SE's users' time. However the last major thing we have been able to decide is that they aren't worth our own time (even after trying to improve and fix them), so our users are not likely to re-learn a new set of quality guidelines for identification questions that we've already tried before and has in no way worked out, not barely.
This generates unnecessary work as a side effect. Where as currently "identification questions are off-topic, because they tend to attract low-quality and low-effort posts", the proposal has not addressed the problems (why do you want floods of low-quality and/or low-effort posts?) (edit: have not appeared to discuss in regards to remedying the problems to be worth the effort) and wants our questions that are fantasy-related. This leads to every new identification request having to be scanned for fantasy, it's not a trivial amount of work for a pool of questions that Sci-Fi users have no promise to fix into shape.
Conclusion: Implementing the migration path appears to be a liability, and as there is no compromise to be made, it doesn't seem like a good solution. However, as with all solutions, they should be implemented to solve a problem. While a migration path is not a good solution, there may exist others when the problem is identified.
Identification questions has made up a large percentage of our regular "income" before they were banned, so there is definitely a "market" there but there needs to be more realistic ways to get questions over to Sci-Fi (while taking into account that we want all of them out of here without worrying about fine grains).
I can't imagine that Sci-Fi isn't already getting its fair share of animated fantasy works and the existing field there is healthy. Implementing this migration path without solid promise for their users to be doing the work to fix them into shape would only pollute this small haven and waste both of our communities' time.
Addendum: Recently, some users (should this even be plural? I didn't notice if they were the same persons) have been manually redirecting question askers for the possibility of reposting their question there. You can judge the results for yourself.
Post script: I didn't realize what a migration path meant, I assumed the discussion was surrounding opening a new close vote option for all reviewers. While I think that good questions that could find a home on Sci-Fi.SE safely may be worth migrating to on a case to case basis, it shouldn't be Anime.SE's job to identify them.
Post-post script: I was right in assuming what a migration path meant, ignore this block. As things are now, manual migration by moderators is already possible.
I think a lot of our users here want nothing to do with ID requests anymore, and we wouldn't mind if they (SciFi users) filtered through them and took what they like. (comment if you disagree)
Migration requires 5 votes (if I'm not mistaken), but I don't think anyone here wants to think about whether it's a worthy question to migrate. Because there is a "don't migrate crap" policy and SciFi has their own set of rules for ID request quality, this is kind of a headache.
If the SciFi users really want this to happen, they'll have to follow all of our newly posted questions. In chat, Sakamoto does this for our room, and they could also subscribe to the same feed in their chat room to monitor new questions. Then SciFi users would have to come and vote to migrate if they deem it useful.
So this is a way to enable this without requiring any extra action from our users or moderators.
Y'know, I'm late to the conversation and I'm late to how this has panned out, but from my perspective we've been doing this for at least most of December.
My take on this:
I hate the idea of giving another community the detritus that we genuinely didn't want. It makes me think that we're giving them hand-me-downs that have been utterly ruined in ways both imaginable and unimaginable.
I hate the idea of catering to a demographic of user who is only here for an instant, who only want to engage based on this one premise, and will not add positively to any community. I get that I'm painting a group of people with a broad brush, but there is some data to back me up on this.
I hate even thinking that these questions are suitable for Stack Exchange's Q&A style period, given that they're really...not. This gets to the heart of asking what the purpose really is for SciFi.SE.
I hate the idea of migrating what essentially is grunt work; even if the other side of the fence is willing to accept it, it feels like a non-trivial amount of effort for a trivial gain.
I feel like identification questions have no real value anywhere that they go. I genuinely fear that SciFi may run into the same fork in the road that we did three or so years ago with them. Learn from our lesson; don't accept any more. It's not going to make your community any better. It's not going to make ours any better for sending them over since it won't change the fact that we get them at all. For those who think that this'll lead to users shifting their attention to SciFi instead...given how often they contribute to the site after they ask an identification question, I have strong doubts.
To go a bit more into providing some data, (at the time of writing) I have access to the stats for migrated questions.
In the last 90 days (from 2 January 2018):
Of those 10 questions:
To put that into perspective with Area 51's applicable metrics, which are:
The migrated questions have:
I entirely recognize that this is early days and that these are a small sample set. However, I'm not convinced that just accepting these questions from us is going to be the best approach here, nor do I feel like it's going to improve either community in the long run.
Yes, absolutely we should take them up on their offer. Having to close and delete ID questions is a hassle, but that doesn't mean that we can't still take a few extra seconds to point those users to somewhere they might find help.
As has been pointed out, waiting for a five user quorum (for a formal migration) is probably the wrong way to go with this. Since these questions are definitely going to be deleted (and hence there will be little controversy over them being migrated instead of deleted), it's far simpler to have the moderators use their powers to move them over as soon as they're seen by raising a custom moderator flag on them.
"Hey moderator, this would be a good fit for SFF and should be migrated"
Anything that meets the following three simple-to-understand conditions;
Contains science fiction or fantasy content
Not Hentai / Animated pornography
Appears to contain a uniquely identifiable question (so "Help. I'm trying to remember a story about a giant robot" would be a no but "Help. What is this story about a giant robot called an Eva" would be a yes)
If there are any problems, the migration will simply get rejected but as long as you've followed the three rules above, the chances of that happening are next to zero.
