How should we handle questions currently closed on SO?

Question

Note (copied from Mark Trapp's answer)

This question was posted before the Great Disciplining of Programmers.SE and is rendered obsolete by the following resources:

• Programmers.SE FAQ
• Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
• The Six Subjective Question Guidelines — Enforcement Notice
• Real Questions Have Answers

When this site was proposed, there was an unspoken understanding — heck, sometimes it wasn't even unspoken — that it was the place for questions like "What's your favorite programmer cartoon?" and "What book should every programmer read?"

Assuming for a moment that the migration pathway opens up from SO after the beta — that's being discussed at a separate question — do we still want to ask those questions during the beta? It's already happening; example 1, example 2.

On the one hand, it seems redundant. But on the other hand, there's always the merge function. Back to the first hand, merging will probably create some dupe answers. But on the second hand again, there are already dupe answers.

Answer 1

Note

This answer was posted before the Great Disciplining of Programmers.SE and is rendered obsolete by the following resources:

• Programmers.SE FAQ
• Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
• The Six Subjective Question Guidelines — Enforcement Notice
• Real Questions Have Answers

I think asking them now before a migration path is important as it sets the tone for the site.

This site is a little different than previous SE sites in that it's meant as the place you put all the off-topic and subjective but still programming-related questions that get closed on Stack Overflow. It's important that we can show that demonstrably by seeding the site with quality questions that would normally get closed on Stack Overflow.

If we limit ourselves to questions that haven't already been asked on Stack Overflow when this site is meant as a place for all those questions that don't belong on Stack Overflow, the amount of questions available to seed the site becomes very limited.

Although, I should say the examples you pointed out are pretty low quality to begin with, and I hope they aren't going to be used as exemplars for what Programmers.SE will become. On another question, I suggested those types of questions that are of the ilk What's your favorite cartoon? or What's your favorite quotation? might be better off closed as off-topic even on Programmers.SE.

Answer 2

My thought is that we have a silly situation right now.

A question might be a really GREAT high quality question, but not on topic for SO, because it's subjective. Such GREAT high quality questions as the list of free programming books, which is the TOP most upvoted question of all time on Stackoverflow, is now closed, and locked and homeless. Too old to be moved/merged up to Programmers.SE, and yet, so worth asking.

Just because the "karma whoring" answerers reposted it, doesn't mean having that content here is wrong. In fact, they were simply abhoring the vaccuum that the process that created Programmers.SE created.

My view is that we should make all the really classic subjective questions that are on SO already, and are closed and locked, visible here on Programmers, so that when you search for duplicates, because someone is asking a new question that's an exact duplicate of an SO question that got closed and locked, after 500k views, and a thousand upvotes, they can be seen here.

If we don't do that, we'll get the situation we have now, which is a completely predictable MESS.