Cross-posting from other sites

Question

I frequently see questions on other sites (usually Reddit's r/korean) where I think they would be good questions for our site. What do people think about cross-posting them here? I'm not saying they shouldn't be on other sites, but that they are also good questions to have archived in a Q&A format like ours (rather than future onlookers trying to fish for the answer in a sea of comments). If we think it's ok, some sub-questions:

• Should cross links be provided in both directions? (I think yes, but any special format?)
• If the question is already answered on the other site, should the cross-poster self answer?

Answer 1

I think that linking to the Reddit question, then asking for further explanation is completely fine. It can never hurt to have a different group of eyes look at the question, and it builds content for our site.

As always, the question off of Reddit should be appropriate for our site. However, I think that Reddit (and similar sites) has many good questions that could be considered on this site.

My personal thought on self answering is that we could perhaps wait 24 hours or something to allow for "new" answers native to Korean.SE. I think this could encourage the questions to be answered more fully. Sometimes, when a user sees that a question has already been answered, they themselves do not want to add anything further. However, if we give our own internal users a chance to answer, that could allow for new perspectives from our community. After a certain grace period, self answering for the furtherance of the community is certainly allowable I would say.

Answer 2

I think that if someone doesn't understand the answers posted to a question on another site (or if the question doesn't have any answers), and that user either doesn't have an account on that site or that question is not getting enough attention on that site for the user to get a satisfactory explanation, then I think it is fair to post the question here. It's possible that someone who can answer that question clearly is active here and not on the other site. If someone wants to cross post their own question on many different sites in the hope of getting an answer in one, there's not really much we can do about it anyway.

That being said, I don't think it's OK to plagiarize questions and answers from other places just for the sake of adding content to this site. If we want to cross post someone else's question from another site here, we should at least try to phrase it in our own words, or if we find the answer to a question here on another site, we should give them proper credit and try to add some original contribution here.

Answer 3

A similar question was asked on the main Meta site:
Is it okay to repost a question from another website that was never answered there?

Although that discussion concerns reposting unanswered questions from other sites, it does have relevant information.

The intention on this site (as with all StackExchange sites) is that this site should become the definitive repository of information. So increasing the knowledge base of the site is a good thing.