(When) is cross-posting ok?
This community sometimes gets posts that are copied from other sites. We delete those because copying from somewhere else is plagiarism. How do we want to handle cases where the author does the copying? If somebody says "I am the person who wrote that Quora/Reddit/SE/etc question and I want to ask it here too", what do we want our policy to be?
To avoid the appearance of plagiarism I think the post here would need to, at minimum, say something like "I previously asked this at (link)" and include the link.
Is that sufficient, or do we have other expectations?
2 answers
This is my personal opinion and not an official position of Codidact.
I have sometimes re-asked questions when I asked them somewhere else and didn't get the results I was looking for. What I usually do in this case is:
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Wait a reasonable amount of time -- give the original question a chance to be answered. This is fuzzy, I know, and depends in part on the "speed" of the other site.
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In my new question, account for anything I learned from the first question. If I got no responses, I try to figure out why and improve my question -- ask a better question, taking into account the previous question's activity or inactivity.
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Say explicitly that I previously asked elsewhere, with a link. This is for clear attribution and also so that it's easy to check back on the original question later.
I think an approach like this could work here. We don't want to bar people from asking a question just because a previous attempt got no responses, but we want to identify some reasonable guardrails around multi-posting the same content.
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User perspective
From the perspective of a user, my minimum requirement would be that every version of the question should include links to all other versions of the same post. In particular also the existing post should be edited/commented on to include links to new versions.
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this will ensure that future users with the same problem don't get stuck in a dead end. If they don't find a solution here, they can at least move on to check the other versions of the post.
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it avoids users spending time and effort on developing a solution to a problem which might already have been solved. A user can of course make the deliberate decision to answer an already solved problem, e.g. with a different approach, but they need to know about about existing answers to make this deliberate decision.
Site perspective
Verbatim cross-posts don't seem to be advantageous to the search engine optimisation of a small site like Codidact - in particular if they are the majority of posts.
On this basis, I would ban verbatim (or near verbatim) cross-posts for now. If the activity of the site grows, one could revisit this policy.
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