Proposal: Vi and vim
I'm not sure how the typical approach is with such sites. If we now have 5 sites where Vi(m) is on-topic, and we launch this proposal, wont we end up having 6 instead of 5? Or would old [new] questions be migrated to the new site? What is SE policy in such cases?
To quote from Respect the community – your own, and others’:
Be extremely reluctant to migrate old, answered questions. The votes and answers on these reflect the opinions and work of the community where they originated, and in most cases they'll be somewhat out of place elsewhere – you want your greatest hits to reflect the best that your community has to offer, not someone else’s. And, again, the migration can come across as rude: if someone has invested serious effort into an answer and has linked to it on their blog or from their résumé, then snatching it from them without due consideration won't endear them to you. Only migrate these questions when the alternative is deletion.
Since that post was written, we have disabled migration of old questions entirely. So there's no way that the majority of questions tagged [vi] or [vim] would be migrated to a new site.
It should also be rare for new questions to be migrated away from Stack Overflow. Vi/Vim questions are already getting prompt, quality answers on Stack Overflow. If someone asks an ontopic question, they naturally expect they will get an answer without having their question migrated.
Finally, if the site graduates, it's possible to migrate a limited number of canonical questions from other sites.
I don't think this happened on other sites.
A question relating to Vi and Vim is valid on both sites. From What topics can I ask about here?:
if your question generally covers…
- a specific programming problem, or
- a software algorithm, or
- software tools commonly used by programmers; and is
- a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development
… then you’re in the right place to ask your question!
A question about Vim obviously falls in the third category. Making exceptions to this rule would be impractical and serves little value.
If you see a great Vi or Vim question on stackoverflow, and feel it should be here (and isn't already), then ask it! You can even "answer your own question" from the answer from the other question, as long as you provide proper attribution (cc-by-sa, see link at the bottom). I bet some answers may even get better answers on this site than they originally got on SO.
For some questions, other sites may even be more appropriate:
I don't think anyone is going to mass-migrate all the old questions. Probably SuperUser should migrate most new, good vim questions here (of course, do not migrate questions that should be closed instead: never migrate junk). Stack Overflow, Unix.SE, Ask Ubuntu, and Server Fault when it isn't heavily reliant on expertise particular to those sites. Not sure what official SE policy is on this.
No. But instead of the sophisticated answers, the truth is that the SE management somehow tries to protect the SO as they only can. That the SO is currently governed like a maffia, it doesn't matter for them.
Actually, you could be happy that the vim proposal wasn't deleted long ago. Many similar proposals was killed because "they had been clone of SO".
In most cases there is an instinctual, territorial status quo between the site mods. This avoids most migrations, it doesn't matter how trivial they are.
The SO admins/powerusers hate the other SE sites, because their diamonds / 20k+ repu isn't valid on them. They try to destroy their concurrence since years.
The SE management wants to grow, but they won't conflict with the SO volunteers. Although these "volunteers" long expelled everybody out of them thinking other ways as they are. "Don't change a working system", this is what the SE management follow, and it will be going so until the currently exponential growth of the SE network remains.
