Is it acceptable to glean questions from other cooking sites?

Question

I've noticed that AtillaNYC has been copying questions from other cooking sites verbatim. Is this acceptable and/or encouraged?

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Edit by Dinah:

My original question is above except that I did not include any names. Below is an edit by hobodave as is the user link above. I'm not removing his edits since they are relevant. However, my intention was to discuss a practice and not a person.

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Example 1:

• https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/7105/is-it-safe-to-consume-evaporated-milk-daily
• http://www.ochef.com/answers/1642.htm

Example 2:

• https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/7107/how-many-grams-is-a-square-of-baking-chocolate
• http://www.ochef.com/answers/1646.htm

Example 3 (sort of):

• Is there a safe way to remove items that have fallen into a Garbage Disposal?
• http://www.ochef.com/products/alligetter.htm

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These were all on the front page of ochef.com:

Regarding my edit (hobodave)

I think this discussion will be much simpler if we're including concrete examples depicting what Dinah describes.

The inclusion of these examples, as well as the images, do not in any way indicate my approval or disapproval of Atilla's actions.

When my opinion is given it will be in the form of an answer and/or voting on other answers.

Answer 1

This should be an interesting discussion. We have someone who is a very active contributor (AtillaNYC is actually responsible for 7.5% of our questions). However, many of the questions asked are clearly direct cut & pastes from another source on the web.

I actually have two opinions on this that I'm going to separate into two sections. I have a "technical" opinion and a personal opinion. I want to make clear what I'm suggesting the site policy should be vs what I think as a non-moderator. First, I'll address the technical opinion .

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I see this as being closely related to the easy to Google topic. Overall I think it's great to have questions asked even if they are inspired by another source. Example 3 given in the question above is a great example of this. If you see a question asked elsewhere, a forum for example, please do feel free to ask it here! This is a great way to find out if the answer from the other source is really accurate, and find out even more potential answers, as well as see how the community votes on them.

That said, I don't think it's appropriate to cut & paste questions from another source. This just isn't ethical, and feels morally wrong to boot. It also raises the concern of potential copyright infringement. Is it? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't answer that.

So I say "gleaning" a question from another source is fine. However the questioner should make it their own. They should put some effort into improving the question before asking it here. We should draw the line at blatant/near cut & paste though.

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Personally, I'm rather disappointed in Atilla. I've questioned the quality of some of his questions before due primarily to their brevity and simplicity. However, I just chalked it up to idiosyncrasy and appreciated the contributions nonetheless. I was actually kind of fascinated that one guy could have so many questions, and I was quite impressed by the wide variety of dishes he was "cooking".

Now, I feel cheated. "I'm baking a flourless chocolate cake", "I was wondering ...", "I..." seem to have all been lies. What seemed like an eccentric user now seems like a mindless automaton. This feels closer to stealing than "gleaning". I spot checked random questions in his history and many are direct cut & pastes from ochef.com. This makes me feel like taking my votes back, but I'm not going to edit questions just to do that (please no one else do that either).

Going forward if I find a question that is a direct/near cut & paste from another source I'm going to speak with my votes. Simple questions are great. Asking a question you saw from another source is great. Copying questions outright, and in such quantity is just lame.

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For those interested, meta.math.SE has a similar topic going on regarding a user who posts a large volume of questions taken verbatim from textbooks. There are some really good answers there that may be worth a read.

https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/610/user-flooding-the-site-with-questions-more-than-6-day

One paragraph by Tom Stephens really appealed to me (paraphrased in brackets):

With respect to building a community, the more nuanced, genuine issues ... will cultivate mutual respect and provide an interesting place to visit for [cooks] of all levels. A site catering to questions stated as textbook problems will create a repository of homework problems populated by askers only, and I think there are enough sites like this out there already.

Answer 2

I think that there is real diplomacy in @Justright 's answer, and thoughtfulness in @hobo 's; and I agree with the logic and reasoning behind both. However if you take questions from one site, and paste them, UNATTRIBUTED, onto another site it is plagiarism. It does not matter whether it is paraphrased, cut and paste, verbatim, or gleaned the intent is to pass off for one's own work what is actually another's work.

Essentially, if it is your intent to seek an answer, and you are asking genuine questions and attributing them it is fair use of a seeded question. On the other hand, if you are plagiarizing questions, for the sake of seeding a community or simply your reputation, it is wrong. It abuses the community, the respondents, and diminishes the reputation of Stack Exchange overall for people to be out there doing that driving ill-gotten gains, material or otherwise. The community should be against such practices and the shrewd policing already praised I would like to praise again.

Answer 3

I thought it at least worth mentioning that if you're posting your own questions on multiple forums, that's just fine. That could be the case here (though it's unlikely).

Also, I think that if you find a great question on a not-so-great site, it would be okay to leave some sort of mssg for the OP on said site, alerting them that you have asked their question here. That way the OP could find great answers on our great site. :)
... Of course, you could just leave them a mssg to let them know they could ask their question here.

In this case, the volume of questions is impressive; they have sparked much discussion for our community. However, 45 of his questions (40% of his total number of questions) have a vote of 2 or less; 13 (11.5% of his questions) have zero votes, and 6 questions have been closed.

For perspective, I have asked a lot of questions, compared to most users. 13% of my Qs have a vote of 2 or less, the only one w/ zero votes was asked 25 minutes ago, and none have been closed.