"Merge" an answer from one question to another

Question

Existing merge tool

Moderators have the ability to merge two questions together, by declaring one question the "master" and one the "to-be-removed". During the merge _^(AFAIK), all votes, comments, and answers are merged into the master question, and the to-be-removed question is removed from the system. The only two inputs to the tool are the two question IDs.

Proposed extension

I'd like to request a small tweak to the tool. I'd like the to-be-removed input to be able to take an answer post ID as well as a question ID.

• The specific answer will be moved, comments, votes, and all, and merged into the master question, as if it had been posted there originally.
• It would be nice, but not necessary, to record the move in the answer's revision history and visible in the timeline of both questions.

Use case

I don't have a good example use off the top of my head. Here's a semi-fictional use case:

A question was migrated from Stack Overflow to Super User. Most of the answers have a few upvotes and are owned by the Community User, since their owners don't have associated accounts on the destination site.

One particular answer doesn't answer the question, but a user notices it answers a related question exactly. The user posts a comment on one linking to the other. Another user flags to propose that the answer be merged from the migrated question to the related question.

If possible, user permission should be obtained before such a merge, and of course this should be used rarely.

But in some cases it's impossible or impractical to contact a user and request that the answer be reposted to the related question. The moderator, or other users, could repost the answer themselves, but this would lose any votes and comments on the new post.

Related proposals

This proposal is about manually merging a single answer into a different question as a diamond-moderator function.

• This related proposal is nearly identical, but proposes the feature be available to high-rep user moderators with a voting interface, like the current close-question voting. Unlike this proposal, my proposal makes no provision for user voting and no requirement for either question being closed.
  • Allow high rep users to migrate answers from one question to another
• These related proposals deal with automatic merging of questions closed as duplicates.
  • When merging questions, leave the duplicate one as a placeholder
  • Copying the answers for a duplicate question
• This proposal deals with consolidating multiple answers into a single post.
  • Why Isn’t There a Way to Consolidate Answers?