My closed question probably fits better in a different SE — do I have to ask for it to be migrated?

Question

Specifically this question.

Why doesn't my phone scroll if I put a ring flat on the screen?

It's been closed as being too engineering-based, and the Feedback message gave options of other SEs it might fit in. I didn't realise that there was a separate Electrical Engineering SE (although I did choose your electrical-engineering tag, which I suppose means I should have looked!), so it probably would fit better there.

However, whoever closed it didn't migrate it. Is that because:

a. You don't migrate questions
b. You only migrate questions if asked to
c. You do migrate questions, but didn't think the question was good enough

I could just re-write the question on the Electrical Engineering SE, but that seems untidy — it could end up with a closed question here and a successfully answered version elsewhere.

(And I don't know if I should have asked on meta, but couldn't work out how else to do it! I'll delete this later if you want.)

Answer 1

If you think your question is a better fit elsewhere, you have two options:

• Ask a moderator to migrate it
• Ask it yourself at the other site

The second option is always better- most questions need some editing to fit the other site better (at a bare minimum, the tags usually need to be changed). This is made worse by the fact that migrated questions only get one chance- if they are closed they are automatically locked and can't be commented on, edited, or reopened.

We will usually migrate at user request, but we may deny the migration if it is too old, if we can't decide if it's on-topic at the new site, or if we just think it isn't a good question. It can also be automatically rejected for a few reasons. In fact yours would be automatically rejected if we did migrate it, because the only tag it uses (electrical-engineering) does not exist on the target site.

Before asking for migration or asking the new question on the other site, please familiarize yourself with their site. At a minimum, you should their help page on what is on-topic, https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic. Just because the topic of your question is related to the name of their site does not necessarily mean your question is on-topic or will be well-received there.

Answer 2

I am not the moderator that cast the decisive vote to close the question. Personally, I would have no problem just going to your question and migrate it to Electrical Engineering. However, as discussed in this meta post, moderators cannot simply migrate closed questions. One would have to first reopen, then vote to close (again), and migrate it as part of the closing procedure.

Closing over migrating is probably due to your question not been "phrased" correctly for the SE one would migrate to. In my experience on this site, I have predominantly seen questions being migrated to Mathematics SE -- those questions are usually heavily mathematical, so quite an 'easy' judgement. For an Electrical Engineering SE question, I guess you'd have to be more "practical" in your question than you'd normally be on Physics SE, e.g. giving part numbers & such.

That being said, I think you can just copy and paste your question to Electrical Engineering SE as is, I think it's enough detail. The question on Physics SE will automatically be deleted after some time anyway so no risk of duplicates.

For what it's worth, the "answer" to your question is probably that iPhones use capacitive screens (that detect the flow of electricity from a conductor touching the screen, e.g. a finger or a ring), whereas the Kindle uses 'touch sensing' which works optically (infrared) and hence allows the use of the screen with e.g. gloves. But I see something along these lines has already been discussed in the comments.