Asking and answering your own question with just a recapitulation of off-site resource -- okay?

Question

This question was asked and answered by the same user. That's totally fine — actively encouraged on SE. But the answer consists primarily of a recapitulation of — not plagiarism of — this non-SE article, including reusing its animated GIFs. The answer does cite the article, right at the end of the very long answer.

Is this in keeping with the standards of the Movies & TV SE? Even on StackOverflow, which has the stated explicit goal of being the one place where programming questions have definitive answers, I'm not at all sure this would stay open and well-received. But if the goal of M&TV.se is to be a central reference for all things Movie & TV — even when covered comprehensively and easily found elsewhere — then it would be in keeping and appropriate. Is that the case?

Answer 1

This is fine.

The answer has taken its gifs from the Agony Booth article but not its text, which appears to be original and is also much shorter than in the AB article. It also clearly lists the Agony Booth article, with a link, as its primary source.

If someone had

• based their answer on an off-site article without linking to it
• copy-pasted text from said article without acknowledging they were doing so

then that would have been dodgy. But none of that has happened here. All we've got is someone writing a really good answer for the benefit of the site, based on an Agony Booth article and other sources, clearly cited, and including gifs from the AB article but only short summaries of its text.

I say, +1 and keep up the good work.

_{(Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced as a M&TV user, but I am a moderator on The Other Site.)}

Answer 2

Full disclosure: I am the author of the question and answer that prompted this meta discussion.

Self-answers should be treated no differently than other answers

As you said, having one user ask a question and answer it themselves is absolutely encouraged. Going through Meta Stack Exchange's information on self-answering, there is no indication that self-answers should be treated any differently than somebody else answering a question. In other words, when judging whether an answer is acceptable or not, you should ignore the name of the poster. So if there is an issue with this question, it's not because it's a self-answer.

There are similar situations where this already seems to be okay

We have several questions that have answers derived entirely from another site:

• Interview with the director (e.g. What does Ash drink in Alien Director's cut?)
• Wikipedia (e.g. What are the differences between the alternative versions of Blade Runner?)
• Third party reviewers (e.g. Is the story of 'Man of Steel' a fresh idea or is it inspired by any existing work?)

In all of these cases, the source was clearly stated and the answer seems to be sufficiently transformative of the original work, meaning that it isn't plagiarism (which we don't allow on this site).

Images from a third party site are fine if they first came from the movie

You mentioned in particular reusing the animated GIFs first found on Agony Booth. I don't believe that this is an issue because

• The original website doesn't own the GIFs (they are from a movie not created by the site)
• The short clip falls under the criteria of fair use for most countries anyway
• An identical animated GIF could be created from footage of the same source

It would still be courteous to link to your source. And again, we already have questions that do this, such as Man of Steel Easter Eggs.