<p>In my opinion, quote-only answers should not be flagged or deleted - at least not <em>solely because they are quote-only</em>.</p>
<p>Instead, they should be treated just as any other answer. If their application to the question is unclear, one should request clarification, possibly downvote, and if the answerer indeed does not clarify, vote to delete.</p>
<p>However, sometimes a quote is indeed all there needs to be to an answer - for instance, for a question about the correct term for a particular visualization or method, it may be quite enough to paste a quote from a paper.</p>
<p>We have a dearth of answers already, and <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/1352">we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good</a>. Better to have a quote-only answer than no answer at all, because a longer answer would have taken so long that someone who <em>would</em> have invested the time to post a helpful quote did not have the time to instead post a non-quote answer. (And yes, of course that still presupposes some minimum quality.)</p>
<p>The key difference to link-only answers is that (a) the quote actually includes the relevant content, in contrast to a link only, and (b) that links rot, whereas a correctly referenced quote should be stable.</p>
