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Recently, a consensus formed that this question would be a better fit for the Politics SE site than the History SE site. Why are the democracies of France, Israel and India rated "Flawed Democracies"?

Unfortunately, a moderator commented that it was "too old to migrate." So it remains here, but is closed.

When does a question become "too old to migrate?" And why would that be?

Suppose the Politics site just came out of private beta and started public beta today. Would the question then be "to old to migrate" to Politics?

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This isn't new, migration of questions older than 60 days has been disabled since October 2012.

Let's assume for a minute this wasn't the case, and we migrated the question. It would carry with it a +10 answer, which - for Politics.SE's size and age - looks pretty authoritative. However, none of those upvotes have been given by Politics members.

That's not good. People browsing Politics expect answers to be vetted by politics experts, not by historians and history buffs. Don't get me wrong, ihtkwot's answer happens to be a good one, it simply hasn't been vetted by the appropriate crowd.

There are a couple of things you can do:

  • If you really want the question on Politics, you could simply re-ask it there. Ideally ihtkwot would also consider re-posting his answer, and then we would delete the History version.
  • If you think there are a lot of closed questions on History that should be migrated to Politics, then you should make a list. When you're done, you could invite the Politics crowd to check out the list, decide which questions we want, and ask Stack Exchange to migrate them manually.
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  • It seems that the problem with the "Flawed Democracies" question is not "too old," but "too seasoned" (too many votes). The first is a (false) proxy for the second. In that case, the rule might be, migrate questions with no more than a total of x (say five) votes between question ad answers. A question can be 2 years old, have no answers, 1-2 votes, and be "migratable." Another might be two weeks old, have five answers totalling ten votes and not be. Let's "call a spade a spade"
    – Tom Au
    Sep 13, 2013 at 0:46
  • If you want to change the migration rules, you should post a feature request @TomAu. Just take care to read the linked discussions before you do, the votes thing isn't the only problem with migrating old questions, just the one that's more obvious with your specific example.
    – yannis
    Sep 13, 2013 at 1:14

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