When should a question that otherwise belongs on another site be simply closed and not migrated?

Question

This question was closed as off topic, but was not migrated. I (incorrectly) decided to vote to close and migrate to Stack Overflow, but the question was not migrated for quality reasons.

I understand Jeff saying "don't migrate crap", but can someone actually give guidelines on when questions that could otherwise be migrated should simply be closed? This seems to be a point that close-voters tend to miss.

Edit

Per this question, there are other reasons why questions should not be migrated. For example, a question should not be migrated to a beta site unless the site has established itself. Can you list any other reasons for not migrating questions, in addition to low question quality? (This might be useful for users who flag to migrate.)

Answer 1

Any set of guidelines is going to be inherently subjective, but here are mine:

• Look at the OP's rep / other questions on the site that you are thinking of migrating it to. If they have a lot of closed/downvoted questions, it is probably a good bet that this one is going to be closed, too, even if you aren't very familiar with the subject matter or the other site. Additionally, they may be question banned.

• Before you migrate anything, no matter how good or bad, see if you can edit the question to improve it. If you can make the question more generally useful to a wider audience without writing an entirely different question, and clean up things like grammar, formatting, etc. to the point where it's not crap, migrating it MAY be okay.

• Obtain any clarification needed from the OP in the comments on the current site and edit their answers into the OP, before migrating; this will ensure that the receiving site gets a nice, clean question with no loose ends.

• If you have ANY doubt about whether your edited question is topical or is crap or not, you can ask a moderator or experienced user of the prospective receiving site, usually in their chatroom. Do this BEFORE casting your vote.

• Imagine the possible answers to the question. Now, ask yourself, how many individual people will this help, in principle? If it's "one....... MAYBE at some point two", it's probably not a good candidate to migrate. If people will be able to refer back to this question as a piece of knowledge, it is a good candidate to migrate.

• Subjective questions, while sometimes appropriate when asked on the correct site, tend to be worse candidates for migration than questions with a definite answer.

• Attempt to determine if the user is asking a question on the wrong site specifically because they have been question banned on another site where the question would be on-topic. If this is the case, you should consider this information in determining the likely quality of the question, or how it will be perceived by the receiving site's community.

Answer 2

This is what I usually do, other than relying on the wisdom of the commons (or the other VTCers.

1. Do I actually know the topic enough to decide on the quality of the question

2. Is this a great question which closing or deleting will be a tragedy. Failing which, is this a good enough question, on topic, which is worth migrating.

3. If possible, I try to check with a mod on the other site. Its pretty easy for us and SF for example, with some overlap in users.

4. If possible check for existing dupes.

5. SO migrates crap anyway... so SERIOUSLY consider throwing it over the fence Vote appropriately. I tend to close rather than migrate in doubt, since I figure if it really SHOULD have been moved, ask a mod to move it. If its definitely a good migration candidate, then vote to close it