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If there is any quality and well researched answer in Quora or Yahoo with appropriate references, can that be put in an answer here as a reference link? Sometimes those answers accumulate references from different reliable sources in a single place, hence can that link be given in Hinduism.SE's answer? For example, there is a beautifully explained and well researched answer on Abhimanyu and chakravyuh in this link. So, in these kind of scenarios, can the link of quora page be given in an answer?

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    Do you mean "Should we allow Quora/Yahoo answer?" ?
    – Kedarnath
    Oct 3, 2014 at 5:45
  • I mean, if I write an answer here, and some well researched answer is given in quora, can that quora link be given in the answer?
    – arin1405
    Oct 3, 2014 at 5:48
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    can & should have different meaning. Of course you can as it is your post. But I dont know if you should do it or not. Lets wait for other's opinions.
    – Kedarnath
    Oct 3, 2014 at 5:59
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    this practice should be discouraged for answers, however adding a comment with such links would be fine though
    – Vedantism
    Oct 3, 2014 at 6:55
  • @PratikBhat could you please explain why should it be discouraged? If someone writes his/her own answer and puts a link of quora/other site and the content is not a casual discussion but a well referenced and well researched one (as i have given one example link in my question). In stack overflow many links are provided to other sites.
    – arin1405
    Oct 3, 2014 at 7:08

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Ok, a nice question and an important one. So, Can any reference to Quora/Yahoo be put in an answer?, I would say ignore.

Here, am not saying that you can't link, but I would say ignore doing so, will provide you reasons below :-

So you should ignore referencing them because :-

  1. Yahoo answers are pathetic, trust me. You'll hardly get any answer which is a quality one on yahoo. Also, users troll more often instead of explaining real things.

  2. Now as I clicked the link on your post, was surprised to see that I was able to read all the answers on that page, but Quora used to hide them initially if the users are not logged in. So sharing a link where a user cannot read the referenced link without logging in makes no sense.

  3. Well, lets not forget 404. Ain't sure about the rules on those sites but say a post might get deleted. Referencing to an answer on those pages, might result in links getting broken and your resources will not be useful anymore.

  4. Posts might get edited and changed. Stackoverflow does preserve post history, but may be these sites won't. So if you provide a reference link in your post and later after few months if the post is changed without any revision history, user following your shared link will be confused or misguided.

I would say, keep an habit of posting scripture references along with the shloka(part) number. This way, regardless of what reference you provide, at the end, user can follow that number and read from that particular book, say Mahabharata, Gita so on.

For more information over abbreviations along with the numbers, refer this post.

Explain abbreviations used by users briefly

Still, if you feel that the answer on the other site is real deal, feel free to refer but don't forget to explain the answer in detail. Don't copy the answer, try to learn and write it in your way and if you want, you can credit the author from where you learnt by providing a reference link.

So, yes, it is fine if you provide links to any websites but make sure that they are reliable, but I would say ignore doing so.

Note : It's an opinion, not a rule yet, so wait till others comment and clarify.

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  • I think Quora can be useful sometime but as you said, it require login to read things fully. Anyways great summarized answer.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Oct 22, 2014 at 11:41
  • Good answer. I think one more thing we can do is to paste text in a quoted block and to provide a reference to the external site. So, that ways content which was originally there at the time of asking or replying the question can be present all time in SE and link can be used as reference or to see any updates.
    – Aby
    Dec 10, 2014 at 14:30

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