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The reason I have come to asking this question is due to the plethora of questions that are of the effect of "this word" vs "that word".

  1. Are these types of questions always on-topic for UX.SE ?
  2. Are these types of question only sometimes on-topic for UX.SE ?
  3. If they are deemed off-topic, what should we do with them?

It is of my opinion, that most of the time, these types of questions really belong on English.SE unless they are actually on-topic due to a specific UX.SE reason.

Examples

There might be some actual on-topic questions below; I'm not passing judgement, just showing the trend of "this word" vs "that word"



So what do we do with the off-topic questions that are just "this word" vs "that word"?

  • Under 60 days, we can vote-to-close and flag it to be migrated to English.SE.

  • Over 60 days, do we vote-to-close as off-topic because it belongs on English.SE but is too old?

    • This would eliminate future answers and comments, as well as discourage these types of questions.

    • If this is the case, do we need a new close reason to support this?


@JonW asked something similar back in 2012 :

Should we close old questions that no longer fit the SE question criteria?

It didn't really receive that much attention, as it only has 53 views, as of right now.

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I think you've really got two questions here, I think the "this word vs that word" might need a separate question. I'll answer the point about off topic questions in general regardless of this specific type of potentially off topic question .


As far as we (UX.SE) are concerned, the important thing is whether the question is on topic or not. If it's not, it gets closed, migration is just a nicety for the asker/receiving site when the question is appropriate elsewhere. Don't delay close voting to find an appropriate home for it, just vote, and if there's another site that is valid, mention it in a comment or use the migration process when possible.

Remember that just because a post is technically on topic elsewhere doesn't mean it should immediately be moved over--the question may simply be a duplicate on that site, it might not be asked properly for that site's audience, or it simply might be in need of a rewrite. This is why I generally don't actually migrate code questions to stack overflow--most implementation questions here are not of the format/quality standards that SO operates on so it wouldn't be very helpful to throw the post/asker to the wolves. Instead they should research the question on the appropriate site and if necessary post a new question written to that sites' standards/audience.

As for why there's a time limit on migration, it's for a number of reasons, but long story short some old, very popular questions were migrated around and they're disruptive to sites in a number of ways. Often UX would get imported questions from Stack Overflow that scored very high but weren't really of the same focus or quality as "native" UX questions, it was pretty awkward to have some of the "best" questions on the site be these very old questions asked by people entirely outside of (or unaware of) the community, and those posters often weren't around anymore either.

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  • Yea I totally understand the time limit, as per @JonW showing me the meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151890/… post. I just don't want my helpful flag ratio to drop because I vote-to-close and flag for migration. That's what really drives this. I want to be helpful, so I'm wanting to know decidedly what to do. It seems like, if it's a new question, then we migrate, if it hits the Hot Network Question jackpot, leave it alone, even if it is off-topic, and then close it or protect it at a later point. Jan 27, 2015 at 17:10

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