Corresponding post on coffee: https://coffee.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1169/230
https://coffee.stackexchange.com/ has now been in beta for nearly a year and while they're still pretty small, questions there are pretty consistently getting answered and beta sites are not at risk of being closed. Among other things, this means the prospect of migrating questions there is a lot less scary now: we're sending people to a site with a reasonably established community and track record and a bright potential future.
I've discussed a bit with one of their mods (fredley) and we both agree it'll be best for our users if we start doing a bit more migration. There aren't a whole ton of coffee questions here, and there aren't a whole ton of cooking questions there, but when it does happen, it's best if we steer those users to the other site.
To be concrete:
The scopes still overlap, so many questions will stay where they're posted. A question that requires specialized coffee knowledge and specialized cooking knowledge might fit on both, and in general we'll respect the user's choice of site to post on. This means we don't generally need to get into debates; if there are good arguments for a question fitting on either site, then that's an argument we don't need to have!
Questions clearly on one side of the line will be migrated. For example, this question about coffee jelly was migrated to us, and in the future, questions similar to this one about coffee storage may be migrated to coffee. (That one's a moot point since it's too old to migrate.) Note that since coffee is in beta, it won't show up in the list of migration targets for you, but moderators do have the ability to migrate questions to beta sites, so if you think something should be migrated to coffee, please flag it.
Keep in mind that this is all in the interests of getting people's questions in front of the people most likely to be able to provide good answers, which as a Q&A site should always be our first priority! I believe coffee has proven that they'll take good care of those questions, and we'll be doing a tiny bit to help them grow. On the flip side, the small number of questions that will be migrated to us will be a big win for users: all the expert cooks here will see them.
I know that some people may be concerned about losing a small slice of our scope, but note that it's a very small slice, so we're not going to be sending away many questions anyway. It looks like 25 of our non-closed questions in the last year (0.8% of the total) are tagged coffee, and of those, something like 10 would've been migrated under the conservative guidelines above. Even being really aggressive, I think at most 15 would've gone. So most everything will go on as normal, with a small number of questions migrating away, and if you miss those questions, you can just hop over to coffee to answer!
Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or other feedback about this! I'm assuming this will be generally all right, but if any aspect of it needs rethinking, we're happy to do that.
