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What is the proper way to cite an answer from another StackExchange site? It is not uncommon to find an answer to a question for SuperUser on ServerFault or StackOverflow. But there doesnt seem to be an easy way, other than to quote the answer and make a link.

One would think there would be a feature to link an answer cross sites, but there doesnt appear to be. That way, if a person upvoted or accepted the answer, that person could get increased rep on one site or both.

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    I consider the "quoting the answer and making a link" thing a proper way of citing an answer. Dec 5, 2013 at 20:07

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There really isn't any policy on this. Just note that content is licensed under cc-by-sa, but Stack Exchange additionally requires you to:

(…) attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (…)

So if you quote (or copy without using visual indication of a quote) content from a Stack Exchange site, you should at the very least include a link. But that's all there is to it, really.

The idea of generating reputation from content that the author has not originally posted does not seem to go well with the current model, where reputation is a direct measure of a person's involvement on the site the reputation was gained on.* If you quote someone's post and link to it, and the reader has an account on the source site, they can upvote the original content if they want.

* except the association bonus

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I usually answer the question and add a link as described here (link to other SE site).

If my answer is purely a copy of the other site and that the person who wrote it is also active on [su] then I usually leave a comment inviting him/her to answer it. There is a downside to this when you get two identical answers (one from each of us) and mine gets accepted before it gets deleted. Which makes me wonder if this is a smart thing to do.

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