Cross-posting Duplicate Questions to Different Communities?

Question

In reference to these:

GIS Stack Exchange: Creating Intranet GIS application

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33419105/gis-application-for-intranet

I was wondering if there was a protocol for flagging questions (if at all) for duplicate questions on different communities? The duplicate question flag only seems to work for the current community as far as I can tell.

So the basic question I have is if there is a clear separation among the various communities or is there something in place already to avoid cross posting on different communities. I could post a piece of python GIS code on GIS SE, StackOverflow, CodeReview, Programmers, and more until I get a response. It just seems a bit wasteful. I guess each community has the option to vote to close as off-topic and not related to that specific community. However, similar to the Where is the line between Python and GIS? debate, maybe cross posted questions will have enough significance on each community to not get closed. Then we could end up with duplicate questions with different answers from different communities. Just seems to me as scattering information instead of keeping it all in one location.

Answer 1

There is an excellent Meta SE Q&A about this:

• Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?

In particular I think this quote by Jeff Atwood in his answer is highly relevant:

Allowing cross-posting is a slippery slope.

If you might have slightly better odds of getting an answer by posting it on two sites, well, by gum, why not maximize your odds by posting it on twenty sites!

My personal policy, when I spot cross-posted questions, usually between GIS SE and Stack Overflow, is to add a comment to each question saying:

• Cross-posted at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...; or
• Cross-posted at http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/...

If the two questions are simply copy/pastes of each other then, to discourage cross-posting, I usually downvote on whichever site I think the question is less on-topic for, and if it is a poor question, then I don't hesitate to downvote on both.

The only cross-posting that I semi-condone is when one of the sites is still in Beta because I recognize that those sites often need help in the form of more questions to get themselves established, and I would like to see our users considering beta sites like the Open Data Stack Exchange for open data questions, and the Hardware Recommendations Stack Exchange for hardware recommendations.

I would far prefer to see cross-posted questions called out via comments, and downvoted, because I think flags should always be the tool of last resort.