A recent comment asked:

Can answers address what the situation is about copying content from SE? Can I copy my own questions or answers over? Someone elses? Has anyone considered or tried copying them en masse?

You can copy your own questions here. You own the content, so there are no licensing concerns. We ask that you review what you're copying and see if you can make it better here -- have you learned anything since you asked it on SE, or are there any other updates that would help people answer you? Can you help to make the newest copy, the one you post here, also the best copy of that question on the Internet?

You can copy your own answers with the same guidelines. The trick with answers is that you'll need a question to answer. We would prefer that you ask a new question in your own words; self-answers are fine. This avoids having to deal with copied content (not good for search engines) and attribution requirements. Please write a real question, one that somebody else could answer too, and not just a stub.

(Aside: Codidact also supports articles (the blog here on Meta is one example), though most communities aren't using them. If a community would like to have a category for a blog, resources, research papers, or anything else that's more article-like than question-like, we can set that up for you.)

Our earliest communities did large-scale imports from SE. At the time we thought this was the best way to help communities migrate; in particular, our very first community, Writing, was badly damaged by SE in 2019, with many people quitting, and we wanted to give them a way to carry on in a new place. Unfortunately, communities don't migrate; they fragment. Most people never made the jump from SE to here, and to visitors we looked like a scraper site. Much later, two of the three communities that did large imports deleted a lot of that imported content. We're reluctant to do large-scale imports on this network now, because they don't seem to help the people who are here. We do have a long-standing feature request for selective import, which we haven't gotten to yet.

posted 10 months ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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