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In reference to this question.

Casper and Anna mentioned possible resistance from the SO community. But that was then, this is now. Anna in particular said no "now while the site is still in private beta". Well, that was 8 months ago, and this morning I bumped into this SO question, which is one hundred percent a Mathematica question, and should have been asked on mathematica.SE, not on SO.

I'm for migrating. Not just this one, but all 2210 questions tagged .

  1. Nobody stops SO users to create a Mathematica.SE account if they're interested in Mathematica.
  2. When I'm looking for the solution to a particular Mathematica question, I do a search on the site here. I don't want to go looking at 10 different places for a solution; if a Mathematica question should have an answer, it should be here.
  3. Anna mentions 2210 questions bumping the top questions list, drowning new questions. I thought of that too, but I expect if the soft guys who maintain SE can write a script to automagically migrate all questions, they can also make that they *don't bump the list.

IMO every question should be in its appropriate place. What do you guyz/galz think?

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    I'm all for it, though I will lose all my privileges on SO and gain little here. Trying to set a Mathematica tag on SO should automagically transfer the question to MMA.SE.
    – Sjoerd C. de Vries
    Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 11:02
  • Copy them over to here, then lock the originals over at SO...
    – cormullion
    Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 11:24
  • @cormullion - That's a thought, but it won't prevent new questions there, especially as long as the mathematica tag exists. I like Sjoerd's idea, I wonder if that can be done.
    – stevenvh
    Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 11:30

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I would strongly oppose this.

First off, you'll never get SE to agree to this, because as long as Mathematica is still considered a programming language, it is on-topic on SO. For instance, there still are about 2400 questions tagged latex, ~10k questions tagged math and ~11.7k questions tagged sharepoint, despite TeX - LaTeX, Mathematics and SharePoint being around for about 2 years or more. In addition, you also have examples like wordpress, with 20k+ questions and several scattered tags covering different aspects of unix/linux, apple, game-development, database administration, etc. despite having separate sites for them (the apple/wordpress/unix guys make some distinction between end-user questions and programming ones).

Secondly, and the most important reason for my objection, is that all of those are collectively grouped under on SO, but that is a blacklisted tag here. This means that all 2k+ questions will be dumped under . We have been very meticulous about tagging and organizing questions neatly and I wouldn't want a big pile to be dumped upon us, destroying everything.

Lastly, there's a lot of crap, localized nonsense there — the very kind that the community here has been actively culling. It again leads to a whole mess that needs to be sorted out. Both this and the previous point might not be an issue if we had a huge userbase like SO to work on it, but the truth is, we don't. It's only a handful of folks that actively retag questions and close poor ones, and this would be a huge burden on them for very little gain.

I would suggest continuing the way other sites and tags do it (and what we have been doing so far) —

  • If it is asked on SO and it is a simple/RTFM/dupe question, just answer it there and point the user to this community. Don't flag it for migration.
  • If it is a good question (and not already a dupe here), then flag for migration and point the user to this community.
  • Do not flag old questions for migration unless it is extremely important and relevant to a current question and even then, ask in chat.
  • If it is a question that's primarily about a different language/software and Mathematica just happens to be one element in it, don't flag it.
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  • Ach, well spoken, warty one.
    – Yves Klett
    Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 18:10
  • Agree, but I've to confess I'd like many of these migrated stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/…
    – Dr. belisarius
    Commented Sep 28, 2012 at 0:47
  • @rm-rf +1, I generally agree with your points. I think though that the argument of number of votes of some individual question being non-reflective of the community is weak: I was already arguing before, that SE model does not make vote count a good measure in the absolute sense, only perhaps in the relative one (for several answers to the same question)... Oops. Forgot that comments are mortal.
    – Leonid Shifrin
    Commented Sep 28, 2012 at 0:58
  • @LeonidShifrin I agree with you, and I don't mind it as long as it isn't something extreme like Waldo. Btw, I moved the discussion to chat (in case anyone was wondering why Leonid's comment isn't attached to anything I said)
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2012 at 1:02

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