Quoting user profile from other answer

Question

When quoting content from another SE question/answer, is it necessary to also reference the user's profile as a separate link?

From this answer:

Source: Change comment character in notepad++ by rafiki

as opposed to this:

Source: Change comment character in notepad++

Answer 1

The problem here is that it depends on the source of material and the licence that they request you follow.

Technically, neither of the above fulfils the requirements of the cc-by-sa licence that all content on Stack Exchange is licenced under.

If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.

Personally though, so long as the source is properly attributed by stating that this is from somewhere else and giving attribution, irrespective of whether it is internal or external to the Stack Exchange network, then I don't see why we need to decide on one format or another.

We try and be quite lenient about the format of the attribution, only insisting that where material is used then some form of attribution is required. Doing anything less is effectively plagiarism.