Robotics.SE,
We are planning to follow up on migrating ROS Answers and Gazebo Answers to Robotics.SE. With this, we’re considering migrating questions, answers, and comments from both of those sites to here. I’d like to get another round of your input on this process.
We’re looking to have 2 weeks of comments and feedback before we take any more steps. In that time, I’d like to ask for your feedback on the following questions.
Selection heuristic
What heuristic would you recommend that we use to select content to migrate?
Clearly we should bring all questions with accepted answers. Some of our users don’t accept answers that are multiply upvoted. Answers with upvotes were useful to somebody, so that’s likely a good bar. I'd suggest that we also bring over questions that were upvoted. They have piqued someone's interest since they were asked which means that it’s likely to happen again. Is there any other criterion you would suggest? The above boils down to:
- Any question that is upvoted OR
- Any question that has an upvoted or accepted answer
Tag mappings
ROS and Gazebo Answers both have their own sets of tags. The tag management on those sites has not been as effective as you are familiar with here on Stack Exchange, so we’re going to need to do some cleanup during the migration.
Similarly, tagging ros on ROS answers is redundant, but theoretically anything coming from there to Robotics.SE should probably get the ros tag.
I’ve also been exploring how to get better about tagging versions of ROS. I’d like to propose that we set up a synonym such that the tag ros gets turned into ros-undeclared-version, and that we recommend people use ros-<ROSDISTRO> as their tag. For example, ros-humble, or, for the version of ROS in Ubuntu, ros-ubuntu. This will help make it clear to readers what context the question is coming from. This would also avoid the Stack Exchange policy of no partial tags.
I would like to also propose the same policy for Gazebo versions and the gazebo blank tag.
Beyond that, we’ve also set up a tag mapping database to try to help generate the appropriate aliases for tags. Please take a look at it here for a proposed mapping. That mapping is open for pull requests or discussions in issues.
Update Edit: I think that it's going to be important to add some of the more popular package name tags. Based on feedback here and our ability to embed content from rss feeds into index.ros.org like here in the Q&A tab As far as I can tell there's no way to get an rss feed for search queries instead of just tags.
Call for mentorship
In addition to bringing a bunch of answers over, there will also be a large new community joining us here on Robotics.SE. It will be important for us to model how to ask, answer, and moderate well here on the site.
There are many in the ROS community who have answered a lot of questions and have a lot of expertise. However, the culture and patterns for answering questions is a little bit different. Teaching people how things work on Robotics.SE will be important, as will be letting the community grow and extend.
I would like to put a call out for everyone who’s been here to be ready for the influx of new users and work to make them welcome.
Formatting suggestions
As we migrate the questions we will be embedding information about where it came from as well as the comments associated with the original posts.
You can find some test posts from this user: ROS and Gazebo Migration
Those tests were done using the API and have trailing JSON metadata which is intended to be reprocessed by Stack Exchange for us. They will now be integrated into the original content and can be ignored.
Anything else we’re missing here? Anything else that should be considered for this migration?
Here's the parallel thread on ROS Discourse: ROS and Gazebo Answers Migration to Robotics Stack Exchange Process
Related past discussions:
