up vote 5 down vote favorite

I identified Who is GLaDOS saying goodbye to in Portal 2? as a duplicate of gaming.stackexchange's Who is GLaDOS's “only friend” as soon as it was posted.

My first intent was to answer it with a link to the question because I think it's a great answer and I don't see what to add, but my answer was automatically converted into a comment as "Trivial answer converted to comment".

What should we do in that case? Close the question? make a copy-paste in a citation block?

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When I asked about this, the indication was that cross posting is only a bad thing if it's intentional. We can't put the onus on users to check every SE site for their question before asking it. The question on Scifi you mention is now deleted, so I have no way of guessing if it was intentional cross-posting or not. – Gabe Willard Jun 5 '12 at 17:39
@GabeWillard It was not intentional, but it does not matter. My question is about how to handle them when their cross-posting status as bean identified as a answerer, if we suppose it stay open. – DavRob60 Jun 5 '12 at 18:15
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I deleted the question when you pointed out it had been asked on gaming. Would it be better to undelete it, based on the answers? – Xantec Jun 7 '12 at 17:15
@Xantec I don't know, It's your call. – DavRob60 Jun 7 '12 at 17:22

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

There is no such thing as a cross-site duplicate. As long as the question is legitimate, it should remain open where it was posted.

(Note that this doesn't apply when the same user posts the same question on multiple sites. This is generally considered a waste of people's attention, because it leads to duplicating the work of answering the question.)

I would copy-paste the answer in a citation block (with attribution, of course):

On Gaming Stack Exchange, Joshua Carmody posted an awesome answer on a similar question which I shall reproduce here:

…

Often the best answer in one community is not the best answer in another community, because different communities have different expectations (for example, answers on Gaming tend to focus on gameplay, whereas gameplay is off-topic here). This seems to be an exception.

Please leave a comment below the question on each site, with a link to the question on the other site. This way, someone can easily find other answers that may have been posted on the site they didn't find first.

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up vote 2 down vote

The only cross-site duplicate is if the same user posts at approximately the same time the same question on multiple sites. Aside from that exception, there isn't a need to check for all sites to make sure the question hasn't been asked.

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