Repost of Questions from Other Sites

Question

I've seen it mentioned on several questions where a thread question will be the exact question asked on another (unrelated to SE) site. What is to be done about this, if anything? I've seen responses having to do with copyright infringement, so believe this, at least, lends validity to referencing the original question within the question posted on M&TV. Problems I have with this are: 1) people are padding their stats on unoriginal thoughts; 2) shows a lack of imagination; 3) could make M&TV irrelevant. Here I am not talking about asking similar questions, as I'm sure this will happen. What I'm talking about is a word-for-word copy of questions (example: Deja-Vu question asked on M&TV and same exact question asked on the Deja-Vu IMDB FAQ page - look at the last question on IMDB.) In my short time here, I've seen probably five or six questions which are re-posts from non-SE sites.

What are the rules covering this on S.E.? I have read this post from S.E. and this post from here on M&TV. While it discusses these issues, it does not really spell out WHAT to do about these types of posts. One of the HUGE issues I see about allowing this (as I stated earlier) is if people see questions reposted on here from other sites, they may see this site as irrelevant, which means they will not frequent, post, or ask/answer questions. This does not bode well for building notoriety throughout the community of movie & TV lovers!

Answer 1

Questions like the one you pointed out should be flagged for moderator attention. We have had a few problems with this before and without any type of attribution (if the original site's policy is similar to SE) then it is plagiarism which is unacceptable to SE as a whole.

As a general rule, it is ok to reference material for your own content. But that is the key word, reference. Without that, you are blatantly copying and not producing anything of value to the site.

Questions that are similar to ones asked before on other SE sites are allowed as long as it is not the same asker asking the same exact question. That practice is site-spam and will be removed as well.

Questions that are similar to ones asked before on This SE sites are duplicates and will be closed as such.

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If you notice any question or answer here, or even on any other SE sites in your travels. Alert the moderators immediately with a custom flag with a link to the other content and we will do our duty to correct this.

Answer 2

We've had meta posts copyright issues in the past, but this continues to crop up from time to time, in both questions and more frequently in tag-wiki content copied from IMDB or Wikipedia. As a result I check all tag-wiki content that I review against a search, but do not do this on questions.

Perhaps we should strengthen the FAQ on this point.

But as @TylerShads says - just flag the post and we can deal with it.