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Comments on What content do we want to import from Mi Yodeya?
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What content do we want to import from Mi Yodeya?
We can import questions and answers from Mi Yodeya.1 You might have noticed that we imported two already, the ones needed by our "not professional advice" notice. What else to import is up to the community.
The earliest Codidact communities (Writing and Outdoors) did bulk imports, excluding only closed questions. This meant that all the content was in one place, but it also made a very large initial pile to curate. Curate, you ask? Well, we can't know who voted how on Mi Yodeya and anyway this is a new site with potentially a new community, so our policy thus far has been to reset votes on import. That means everything starts at zero and you can vote, confident that you aren't double-voting. But seeing a site full of "0" isn't ideal either.
Speaking personally, and not as a Codidact administrator, I now recommend a more intentional and phased approach to data import. That doesn't mean we can't get most or all of it if that's what we want, but we should think about what we want before asking for it.
Here are some things to know about data import, to inform this discussion:
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Data import is scripted but requires developer intervention too; it's not "fire and forget". We would therefore like to batch import requests, accumulating a small list rather than doing posts one at a time. This might mean a delay of a few days between a request and its fulfillment.
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As I've implied, but just to make it explicit, we don't have to do it all at once. We can do multiple imports over time.
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We can import anything that can be expressed in a SQL query. If you can get it using the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, we should be able to get it too. This means we could restrict imported posts by tag, by score, by status (for questions), by how many answers a question has, and more.
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We can import specific posts (like the two we started with). If there are specific posts we want, compile a list of links.
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We can combine imports with categories. For example, if we decide to create a category for Purim Torah and we want to import some PTIJ questions from Mi Yodeya, we can make them all end up in that category instead of Q&A ("main").
How would we like to approach data import?
Update: The question of general imports is still open, but there is now a place to request import of specific questions.
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The Creative Commons license permits this so long as we attribute and link the source. You can see an example of how we're doing this on our Writing site (see the notice at the bottom of the post). Note that we drop this attribution for people who create accounts here and link them to their SE accounts, because those people have now directly licensed that content to us, in addition to other licenses they've granted. For example, this question was imported, but it's mine and I have an account here, so there's no attribution notice. ↩
I would probably be interested, at some point, in importing Q&A in which I've either asked or answered, with rules somet …
4y ago
I don't see why we would throw out the old vote counts. If a few people gain a few extra points on a one time basis, tha …
4y ago
Regardless of what general criteria we come up with for importing data, we should accept requests for specific questions …
4y ago
Allow me to make a counter-proposal. Don't import any content wholesale, but be open to the idea of importing specifi …
4y ago
I think we should delay importing from Mi Yodeya for a while, while we figure out what our scope and standards should be …
4y ago
In addition to whatever criteria we choose for wholesale importing, maybe there can be an option, once the linking Codid …
4y ago
There's also the option of not mass importing at all. Yes it's tempting to want to bring stuff over from Mi Yodeya since …
4y ago
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Regardless of what general criteria we come up with for importing data, we should accept requests for specific questions to import. I re-asked a couple of my unanswered questions here, because we didn't have data import, but that's not ideal (and will create duplicates if we ever do import the originals). Further, this do-it-yourself approach only works for your own content unless you invest a lot of effort to rewrite someone else's question in your own words. If you want to answer a question here but it was asked there, you can't do that easily.
Let's create a meta post where people can comment with links to questions they'd like to import, and once a week or so the developers can import those (or if there are a lot, a manageable subset with the rest queued) and delete the corresponding comments.
By doing smaller batches at first, we can give the new imports more attention (tagging in particular will probably need some cleanup) and also tune the process. If we start by importing with votes, we can also see if that's actually destabalizing or if that's not a concern after all.
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