What are the guidelines for porting one's answers from ElectricalEngineering.SE, if any?
I've noticed that in the edit account section there is a (inactive) link to one's content on a StackExchange site.
This made me wonder if it is appropriate to transfer some content from EE.SE manually.
I have quite a bunch of good answers there and I'd like to "migrate" them here, perhaps after a bit of editing, depending on the question to which I was answering (I'd probably need to make up a new question because some of my good answers were to somewhat incomplete or foggy questions).
Therefore I'm asking:
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Is it acceptable to "port" one's answers from EE.SE?
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Is there some guidelines to do that, especially regarding creating a matching question, either because the OP was not too good or to avoid "stealing" the work of the person who wrote it?
2 answers
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Since my question didn't get an answer yet, I post this answer as a possible solution.
What I'll describe is not meant to be the right way to port an answer from SE network, but just a possible right way. So if you feel another approach could work as well, please add an answer here.
Premise
Situation on SE network:
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Sometimes good answers are attached to questions that aren't that good.
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Almost always the author of the answer is not the author of the question.
Therefore migrating the original question as it is to match one's answer may pose several additional problems.
Solution
What I suggest as a possible strategy is to create a brand you question that can match one's answer. At the same time some editing of the answer may also be useful.
All this will improve the Q+A quality as it is posted on CoDidact.
There is a problem, though. Many questions, even if high quality, may not reflect what the answer owner may actually ask and could skew the perception of people looking at his/her Q&A records.
For example, it would seem odd that an EE with years of experience would ask why bypass capacitors are used on digital chips pins.
Therefore it is useful to add a disclaimer text at the beginning of the question. The text could go like this:
Question Migration Disclaimer. This question was purposefully made-up for migrating and matching my subsequent answer, which was originally posted on ElectricalEngineering StackExchange site. This question might be substantially different from the original question, whose author was not me. Any modification and/or addition was performed to improve the quality of the overall Q+A pair.
Then, in the answer, a similar disclaimer would be put:
Answer Migration Disclaimer. This answer was originally posted by me on ElectricalEngineering StackExchange site. This answer might be substantially different from the original answer. Any modification and/or addition was performed to improve the quality of the overall Q+A pair.
In this way we can signal the reader not only that this is not completely new material (he may have already found the older answer using Google), but that this was not plagiarized and that the enhancements where not made to hide such plagiarism.
Sorry I didn't notice this earlier.
We definitely don't just want to import questions and answers directly from SE. This has been discussed several times on various Codidact sites. Some of the first few Codidact sites did mass-import from SE, and that didn't go very well. Those sites are doing particularly poorly. One possibility is that search engines downgrade a site when it has significant duplicate content of another.
It can be OK to carefully and selectively import a few of your best posts from SE. I did some of that to get this site going over a year ago now, but have not done so recently, and don't plan to. This concept was discussed on the Writing site a while back, and my answer there applies just as well here.
Some points to consider:
- Don't get caught in the sunk cost fallacy. Yes, you did some work elsewhere, and may feel justifiably proud of it. But, that was in another place at another time. We are building this site from scratch. What you did someone else doesn't give you any points here. Try to focus on creating new original content here.
- Please don't bring over anything but your own content. If it requires a disclaimer, we don't want it. Disclaimers advertise the site the content came from.
- If your own content doesn't make sense without someone else's (like an answer to someone else's question), re-write the other content in your own words. Bring over the thoughts (if you must), but definitely don't bring over someone else's words.
- If you do bring over your own content from elsewhere, make it better here than there. There is always something to fix, word better, add, etc. We want to be better than elsewhere. Obviously that's not possibly by copying content from elsewhere.
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