When reading the code of conduct of this site, I was a bit surprised not to see any explicit mention of "academic honesty" there. According to how I read this, you can shamelessly copy tricks or code from other posts as long as you are polite and friendly on the surface. The issue itself has, to some extent been discussed in this post. Personally I would define it slightly broader, i.e. go beyond the question whether or not a user has converted a code fragment to an MWE. In fact, personally I would wish that anyone learning a trick from another answer and using it in their own answer mentions the origin of the trick. Yet the purpose of this post is not to discuss these "details", rather to urge the "powers" to extend the code of conduct by the item "academic honesty".
This is the reply by the officials
Hi marmot,
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Regards, Stack Overflow Team
I am writing this post because I got told to do that, and, more importantly, to have a basis for a discussion with the "authorities". The first step seems to be that we agree within the TeX community on whether or not we want such an addition. Any feedback, of course also critical feedback, is welcome!
Further clarification: There are very different levels of "academic honesty" one may think of. In the nice answer by Raoul Kessels, a very strict implementation is discussed. This is not exactly what I had in mind when bringing this up. I guess if one really was to go for this, we would have to amend a one-line answer by a lengthy list of references. What I had in mind is
- if there is already an answer or a comment that goes into the same direction, one may want to acknowledge this. (Sometimes it happens that one sees a question, knows how to answer it, and when one is ready with writing the code, a comment has popped up going in the same direction. I personally still write "As pointed out by ..., one can do ...", as this does not imply that I learned this from the comment, but just to give feedback that the two of us independently thought about something similar.)
- Of course, if one makes use of another post, which is in turn based on yet another post, I personally think one should only "cite" the more original one unless the later one adds something important. That's of course just my personal opinion.
- If one learns something from another post rather than a manual, say, and uses this much later in an answer, I personally do not think one has to quote the post as long as this does not go beyond the manual. This does not at all mean that answers that "only" point to a specific place of the manual are worth less. It just means that after some long time it may not be possible to recall where one got the information from, and if it is in a manual, then this might qualify as the "original" source.
- As for the question of enforceability: this is no different from the other things discussed in the code of conduct, and I never had "enforceability" in mind when writing this. As far as I understand, the code of conduct does not really get enforced. The reason why I am bringing this up is to say that the expected behavior is to give credit to sources of information.
\if\relax\detokenize{#1}\relax
as a very stable way of testing for an empty argument myself, but honestly have no idea where I learnt about it. Same is true for many other small TeX programming tricks one learns over the time.