Mark questions which have already been asked on stackoverflow as duplicate

Question

I came across a question[duplicate] today on this site which has already been asked on StackOverflow. I wanted to mark it as duplicate but I was not able to do so because when I pasted the link to the original question from StackOverflow, a message said that the question had to be in webmasters.stackexchange.com.

My question is:

Is there another way to mark such questions as duplicate? If not, how do we deal with these scenarios?

I pasted the link to the original question, as the answer to the question[duplicate] asked on this website because I wanted the guy to find that answer ASAP. Is it wrong to do that?

Answer 1

It is not possible to mark questions as duplicate of questions on another Stack Exchange site. They are different sites and they may legitimately have different people asking about the same thing.

It is not appropriate to create a link only answer pointing to Stack Overflow. We want to build a repository of answers for webmasters here. We don't want to make people to click to Stack Overflow to read the answers. The question on Stack Overflow could get closed or deleted while we would still want to have the question here.

Answers on Stack Exchange sites are licensed in such a way that you may freely copy them with proper attribution:

• Link to the original on the Stack Exchange site
• Include the answer author's name and link it to their user profile

If there are several answers on Stack Overflow, it might be best create an answer that incorporates the best of all of them and cites the authors as appropriate.

In this particular case, the question is off-topic on Stack Overflow and is on-topic here. The question should be closed at Stack Overflow and we should have a good answer here.