Return to Answer

As the answers shouldn't be in the Workshop, there's no need to migrate anything. The "Archive" (which isn't a good name), is where the answers are, not the discussion area. What defines the "best" answer as well, votes? That can easily be gamed; FGITW anyone? The answer with the most votes is not always the "best"; especially if one is older than the other and things have moved on. You're doing more harm by not leaving those answers (that, again, should never have been in the "staging" environment) behind.

As the answers shouldn't be in the Workshop, there's no need to migrate anything. The "Archive" (which isn't a good name), is where the answers are, not the discussion area. What defines the "best" answer as well, votes? That can easily be gamed; FGITW anyone? The answer with the most votes is not always the "best"; especially if one is older than the other and things have moved on. You're doing more harm by leaving those answers (that, again, should never have been in the "staging" environment) behind.

Not top mentioned that out of the 4 types (we're still missing "How To?"), 3 go to the opinion-based questions, so it's a little unsurprising to see more volume when 75% of paths take you to the new question type. It's not a level playing field. Without curation, or comments, I can't take the above at anything else but somewhat meaningless KPIs, as it wasn't a fair comparison.

Not to mention that out of the 4 types (we're still missing "How To?"), 3 go to the opinion-based questions, so it's a little unsurprising to see more volume when 75% of paths take you to the new question type. It's not a level playing field. Without curation, or comments, I can't take the above at anything else but somewhat meaningless KPIs, as it wasn't a fair comparison.

Simply put; the question should never have been answered in "The Workshop". If it was, it was answered in the wrong place, just like if someone answered a question in the staging ground in the comments; those comments are "lost" when it's migrated. Answering questions in a threaded discussion environment is not what people using Stack Overflow to find answers want to see, because it doesn't enable them to find the answer easily; it ends up spaced out of many comments, and loses a significant amount of value.

Simply put; the question should never have been answered in "The Workshop". If it was, it was answered in the wrong place, just like if someone answered a question in the staging ground in the comments; those comments are "lost" when it's migrated. Answering questions in a threaded discussion environment is not what people using Stack Overflow to find answers want to see, because it doesn't enable them to find the answer easily; it ends up spaced out of many comments, and loses a significant amount of value. With the threaded style, there's no drive for the author of the many "answers" to consolidate their first "answer" into a complete answer. What you have aren't answers any more, they're long-form comments.