<p><strong>I'm quite sympathetic</strong>--as a mod, I don't like bad questions from other sites landing here, either. I greatly appreciate your reaching out to us with your concern (and not just swearing under your breath at the boneheads over on CV... :-).  Your reminder will cause me to pause a little longer in the future before hitting that "migrate to SO" button.  But please forgive me for replying with some questions of my own, because it seems like some implicit assumptions are operating here and, in the interest of good mutual understanding, we ought to unveil them and briefly examine their implications.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>When a question is off topic here, then why should we make an effort to improve it before closing or migration?  Nevertheless we usually do, but at the point it becomes clear that a question belongs on another site, then <em>the norms of the target site apply</em>.  Wouldn't it then be presumptuous of us to continue to work on the question?</p></li>
<li><p>Following up on that one, it seems to me that if we simply close an off topic question (but not brusquely: of course we would give a reason and it would be that the question is off topic here and it might include some additional constructive comments), then any sentient asker who is still breathing will just head over to another site and re-ask their question there, anyway.  So you guys get to start over without the benefit of any comments or suggestions we would have made along the way.</p></li>
<li><p>The main reason certain questions are being characterized as "low quality" appears to be that they are RTFMs.  This has been <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2686/how-should-you-respond-to-give-me-a-fish-rtfm-questions">debated on SO meta</a>.  My read is that (a) these are acceptable questions unless (b) the asker is a serial abuser.  Are you then suggesting that CV community members should research the asker's history on the target site before voting to migrate?  This seems like it would be asking a little much, and most of us don't have adequate privileges to do this anyway.</p></li>
<li><p><code>R</code> documentation in particular is notoriously bad: it is not a trivial matter to find the right parameter in the right function in the right package to do what you want and even then the manual pages may be opaque (to be generous about it).  I agree that providing evidence of research makes for a great question.  But it seems like a lot to insist that <em>all</em> questions <em>must</em> document a fruitless search in order to be asked.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>When I look at the four examples offered I agree that none of them is a great question.  Yet none of them are on topic here; all are on topic on SO; and three of them are clearly formulated and have answers demonstrating these aren't completely trivial to solve.  That "latest example" is quite clear, IMHO, and the answer requires not only research of the correct parameter, but also knowledge of string handling in <code>R</code> (via <code>sprintf</code>) to solve. Trivial for you and anyone reasonably familiar with <code>R</code> to answer; certainly. So it seems the main objection here is that "easy to answer" = "crap."  Fair enough, if that's the norm on SO (but I suspect not), yet it doesn't seem possible to turn that sentiment into actionable criteria that this community can be reasonably expected to follow.</p>

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<p>By the same lights, although (IMHO) the majority of questions migrated <em>to</em> CV are garbage, we understand that it would be unfair and unreasonable to ask the SO community or moderators to vet statistical questions for clarity or meaningfulness: you cannot be expected to have the knowledge or interest to do this.  (We close a lot of them right away.)  <strong>But please keep sending them</strong>: helping people improve statistical questions is something we are good at and we want to be the ones deciding which questions are worth keeping.</p>
