Update Sep 2022: this is an old post, but the situation has changed since I originally asked this. Please reread and consider answering!
A lot of questions are posted and closed on English Language & Usage SE, including some which are asking about the meaning in context of some passage in a novel/poem/story and which would be perfectly on-topic for Literature. A few of us sporadically check the ELU site for such questions and flag them for migration, but that's not a very well-organised way to find them.
Do we want to have a standard migration path from ELU to here?
Actually requesting one would need to be done on their meta, but we should get buy-in from our community before doing that. That's what this meta post is for. Note that votes on this question will not constitute a consensus: yes/no answers should be posted to reach a decision.
(Back in 2020 when I originally posted this question, Lit was still in beta, and it was [maybe] impossible to create migration paths to beta sites. Since our graduation, that's no longer an issue, so I'm refreshing this post.)What does this actually mean?
For more info about migration, see What is migration and how does it work?
- Migration is for questions that are off-topic on one site but would be on-topic (and of reasonable quality) on another site.
- Migration preserves comments, answers, and upvotes (but not downvotes).
- Currently, questions can only be migrated from ELU to here by an ELU diamond moderator.
- A formal migration path would enable ELU community members to migrate questions in the same way as normal closure. ELU currently has three-vote closes, so this means any three ELU members with >3k reputation would be able to send a question to us.
What are the pros and cons?
- Pros: potentially getting more good questions to our site, more easily than by manual flagging and diamond mod intervention. If migrations can be handled through the review queues in the process of closing, it'll go much more smoothly and won't need to bother so many busy people.
- Cons: potentially getting flooded with bad questions shunted over from ELU, a site which gets a lot of bad questions (trust me, I've spent time in the review queues there). We can't necessarily expect ELU regulars to know Lit scope. Manual flagging by Lit regulars is a way to ensure quality control on what gets migrated.
How can we guess whether the ELU community would send us gems or crap? Well, ELU already has one migration path to English Language Learners and that has led to occasional controversy (A friendly reminder: ELL is not EL&U's trash can). But that controversy may result from the blurry line between ELU and ELL scopes: who defines what's an "expert-level" or "learner-level" English language question? ELU and Lit have much more different scopes (although we should certainly make clear what the differences are, in an ELU meta post, if we do request a migration path).
For 2k+ rep users, here's a list of all questions migrated to Literature: 15 from ELU in the last six months (26 March 2022 to today).
- Some of the OPs haven't linked their accounts to our site, but that doesn't matter much as we can still post answers anyway.
- On the other hand, some OPs like Ahmed Samir (first brought here by a migration from ELU) became very active askers here.
- Some real gems have been migrated, like Meaning of "the matrons are very Sabines" in Fitzstephen's description of London and What does stanza 4 of Defeat by Kahlil Gibran mean?
- Some questions are migrated along with good answers, like Who was killed in the sentence below? and What is a pisserroo?
- Others get good answers from Lit regulars after being migrated here, like What is the meaning of "I was living my own metaphor"? and Meaning of 'pelted clover' and 'gorged pastures' in Louise Glück poem? and Where did Orwell complain about exaggerated praise in reviews of mediocre books?
I think it's clear that we're currently getting a lot of good content from ELU migrations. The real question is, would that continue to be the case if those migrations were handled by the ELU community rather than moderators?
