Guidelines for migration from Science Fiction & Fantasy

Question

I'm putting together an effort on Science Fiction & Fantasy to give users guidance for when they should migrate¹ a question from SFF to a different site on the network.

Literature has a decent amount of overlap with SFF which means there is potential for a lot of migration of off topic content on SFF to Literature.

It would be helpful if the Literature community could put together some guidance on when they would like content from SFF migrating over here. Things to think about:

• Do you ever want it suggesting?
• What sorts of questions do you want migration suggesting for?
• Are there any topics to avoid?

Once the Literature community has an idea of what guidelines they have for migration, could you post an answer to the linked post with them? If not let me know in the comments when it is ready and I can post it there.

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_{¹ Here migration means anything from formal migration to suggesting in a comment when to migrate content to a different site.}

Answer 1

I don't think we need to overthink this. Literature doesn't have many restrictive policies on what kinds of questions are welcomed; here's a few key points which might come to mind when thinking about migration:

• We don't take questions asking for recommendations or for lists of works satisfying some criteria. (SFF has the same policy on such questions, so this shouldn't cause much confusion.)
• We do take both identification questions (unlike a couple of other SE sites) and reading-order questions (which are on the subjective side, so people might be unsure about policy on these).
• We don't care if a question comes from a homework problem or not. We judge based on what's being asked, not on where it came from.
• We have a pretty liberal definition of what counts as "literature". Don't be shy about migrating questions about books because you're not sure whether they're "proper literature" or not. From the help centre:

  We interpret ‘literature’ in a broad sense, including written, spoken and sung works, in all genres, languages and forms: poetry, plays, stories, novels, lyrics, comic books, essays, belles-lettres, and so on.

• We're also pretty permissive when it comes to question quality. The golden rule of "don't migrate crap" still holds - if a question is totally unclear, don't port it over here - but we're quite lax on "too broad"/"needs more focus" (even asking for a general overall analysis of an entire poem is on-topic) and also "opinion-based" (many questions here are Good Subjective but not objectively answerable). We're also fine with questions about the meaning of a word or passage, even those that seem quite basic, because there's often more to be said than just a dictionary definition, and unlike language sites our forte is analysing meaning in context, perhaps including in-story significance of wording choice.
• Our style of answering tends to be a little different from SFF's: we're not strongly wedded to the canon/Word of God approach, recognising that authorial intent is not the only possible answer viewpoint. For this reason, answering simply with "the answer is XYZ because the author said so, here's an interview quote, done" is well-received on SFF but would be less so on Literature. Since we're a smaller site with much less voting than SFF, please bear in mind that migrating well-received SFF answers is going to skew votes in a way that's impossible to reverse here. The current highest-voted post on Literature is a migrated answer which is more SFF-style than Lit-style, and I wouldn't have migrated it.