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I have a few moans about SO, but I also find it very useful. I bear no flair.

The one thing that niggles me most on the web in general, is continuous reinvention. If you must paraphrase someone else's work then do. However most of the time a simple link would suffice. The same for repeat/similar questions. And it's always good to reference your sources.

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A disappointing percentage of links go dead, thereby making the answer useless. This problem increases over time.

That's certainly a good point, but it seems wasteful to copy, just in case. Surely though multiple links would decrease that chance.

What I was really getting at was wholesale monotonous rewrites. A lot of the web in my mind could be DRYed up. But perhaps redundancy isn't the issue I think it is.

I do feel I do a lot of toing and froing with searches. More than in the past, but possibly that's just because there is so much more information to filter. I'd have thought that healthy linking would help search engines.

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