Overlap, reliable sources, and attribution

Question

Two questions:

It is inevitable that there will be overlap between Health.SE and Biology.SE, and as a member of Biology, that is absolutely fine with me. This question is answered with an attributed answer from Biology.SE (and an additional resource was added as well.)

My questions:

1) Is importing an answer from another SE site acceptable? What if it is one's own answer? I have not seen this done before, and don't know the 'official' policy if there is one.

2) On some SE sites, such as EL&U, unattributed sources are deleted on site for plagiarism. Will we have the same policy?

Answer 1

These are good questions that must addressed.

Is importing an answer from another SE site acceptable? What if it is one's own answer?

I think it is acceptable to use an SE answer from another site, and even this site too, as long as you link to the original answer like you would with a regular online source and you acknowledge the writer of the original (and maybe link to their profile too). It may even be nice to to tell the user if possible, but this shouldn't be required. Using your own answer as a reference is fine, too. In fact, I have done this multiple times on this site already. The answer you mentioned does this properly.

On some SE sites, such as EL&U, unattributed sources are deleted on site for plagiarism. Will we have the same policy?

I think that we should have this policy even though it may be hard to moderate. On answers that don't have references it will probably be easy to tell if there is plagiarism. There can't really be plagiarism on answers that do have references but it is still a good think to look out for.

Answer 2

I'll answer the first question, which was:

Is importing an answer from another SE site acceptable?

User-contributed content on all Stack Exchange sites is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA 3.0)¹. Therefore, the content may be copied and/or redistributed on any site (including Stack Exchange itself) as long as it is attributed to the author and satisfies the share-alike clause². The original author does not have the ability to revoke these permissions.

Answer 3

1) Is importing an answer from another SE site acceptable? What if it is one's own answer? I have not seen this done before, and don't know the 'official' policy if there is one.

Adding to the other two answers, I also think that it is perfectly fine to copy another site's answer with attribution. I'd like to add though that I think it's a good idea to mark the answer as a community wiki in that case. That means that the reputation when the answer is voted on or accepted doesn't go to the person who copied the answer. The attribution link might encourage readers to go to the original site and give credit to the original author.