Policy Poll: "Did you try Googling"?
A certain question has twice now been hit by the dreaded "You can find this information by Google"
I've noticed this has occurred quite frequently, especially link-only answers which I delete as a "this should be a comment" policy.
I am leaning towards deleting pure copy paste answers along the same lines, but deletion may be somewhat overkill since they do technically answer the question (even if in a passive-aggressive way).
However, I would like to hear the community's thoughts on the matter. How should we treat these kinds of answers?
1 answer
"You can find this information by Google"
Can you though? Like the person who posted the answer, I just typed the question title in Google. After which I only get other Q&A sites like Stack Exchange and Quora. These are (like Codidact) not necessarily canonical or trusted sources, if compared with something like the Oxford Dictionary or books/research written by recognized domain experts. Nor do the posts in this case quote any such canonical sources.
Since the posted answer does not quote any canonical sources, nor add anything of unique value to this site (like the other posted answer does), there is no obvious reason to keep the answer around.
I suppose some exceptions to that would be if the SE post is of exceptionally high quality, or in case the person who posted it is a recognized topic expert (always hard to tell). Alternatively if the user who quotes the external resource is also the author of that external resource, in which case I believe quoting is entirely appropriate (and in accordance with "license-lawyering") and the answer should be kept.
My conclusion is that we should trust appointed moderators here make the call whether to keep the post or delete it, on case-to-case basis. If a "quote-only" answer adds something of value to the site it may be kept, otherwise it may be deleted. A good indication of such might be the answer vote score.
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