Since the  to the close as duplicate mechanism it is a lot more visible to the OP that there is/might be a duplicate to their question. Empirically, I've noticed a lot more people agreeing, in the comments under their question, that their question is a dupe.   For instance, :        I'm aware that allowing  is  (back in the stone age) but now Stack Exchange is so much larger, and Stack Overflow is groaning under the weight of questions, I think this should be partially revisited.  Based on the principle that the simplest way to keep a site clean is to have as many people as possible nibbling away, I propose that the OP gets granted a binding close-as-duplicate vote.  It should simply be an additional line in the banner, which is . It might be something like this:     This question may already have an answer here:   &nbsp; "" 3 answers   &nbsp; Does this fully answer your question?  Yes / No   I'm not wedded to the Yes / No thing I just can't think of a better way at the moment.  Clicking on Yes would take the OP to the close as duplicate dialogue with that question highlighted. If there are multiple duplicate questions you'd need to ask the OP multiple times. A No could be used to track the relative success of the project, i.e.   Whether the question subsequently gets closed. Whether the question gets reopened again. How many times the OP actually clicks. How many times the OP disagrees with the analysis of the community.   Potentially, a No could be used to open a comment dialogue asking the OP to explain why they think their question is not a duplicate thereby stopping them simply putting "this is not a duplicate" in the question and formalising this process somewhat. Not sure about this idea...  I do not think this should be restricted by reputation, anyone should be able to close their own question as a duplicate. It gives people with lower reputation a more positive experience of the closing process and emphasises the importance of duplicate finding.  Most importantly, self-closes should not, initially, count towards the question ban. We can help new users learn how to use a lot more of the site than they might otherwise see and encourage them to search for duplicates more thoroughly. If the OP then goes on to do the same thing 10 times in a row then you can start using it toward the ban as they're obviously using the users as a personalised search service but at least the first 3-4 times this should not have any effect.  This question is, deliberately, only requesting 20% of the linked question (from 2009) and then only based on the new UI. The linked question asks for binding migration votes etc, which I do not want to see and I am not requesting a binding close-as-duplicate for the OP until someone else has already voted to close (though I think if the OP has 3k rep this might be allowable). This, I hope, addresses the concern's raised in the linked question and explains why this is not a duplicate of that question.
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, the banner shown to askers whose questions have attracted at least one duplicate close vote has a couple of new options:    If the author clicks the first button, they're shown a confirmation that clarifies the results of this action somewhat:    If they click "Ok", the question is instantly closed:    If, instead, they edit, they'll be offered this guidance:    ...and once an edit is submitted the choice will go away until another duplicate close-vote is cast.   In just the past day, 80 questions  network-wide have been closed in response to confirmation from the asker; edits by askers are up significantly as well.   We'll be monitoring the results to see if further adjustments are needed. A few open questions surrounding this change include:    Perhaps if the number of votes is below some threshold?   I'm posting this separately from  to allow room for discussion and .
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Before you vote to close: there are a lot of questions with titles and/or bodies that are similar to this one. However, none of the ones I saw deal with this particular case.    I have an  that is appropriately closed as a duplicate of an FAQ entry. I just tried to delete it because it doesn't really add any useful search terms or overall value to MSO. I got the following message:     Sorry, this question has answers and cannot be deleted; flag it for moderator attention instead.   That's the same message that comes up when you try to delete your own unclosed answered questions. Since I'm a 10k user, I think the system should at least allow me to cast a regular, non-binding delete vote for that post, if not delete it unilaterally.  I also think that 20k users attempting to delete their own recently closed posts shouldn't have to wait through the 48-hour "possible reopening" period, but since my example question was closed over a year ago I don't know what the system actually does.
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Is there any value to NOT deleting my own questions closed as duplicates?  Does anyone benefit from me leaving these questions there dangling in infinity?
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I only say duplicates but I think this could be extended to several other flagging reasons. Since accepted answers/upvotes don't get reverted on questions I see people sometimes cut and paste the answer from a duplicate question without flagging as duplicate. In the end they can usually score a few upvotes and even an accepted answer.  Found this related question:   Seems to have a lot of popularity but nothing ever happened  Jeff on Dupes     Those arguing for “remove reputation from dupes” have no idea of the   Frankenstein monster you’d be creating.      That would be an awesome rep-denial tool for griefing others, first of   all.      Second, it creates a MASSIVE disincentive to participation — even if   you had no idea there were duplicates, you could be bushwhacked at any   time even if you contributed a fantastic answer. Oops sorry dupe!   Zero rep, buddy! Bzzzzt! Go away! Take your awesome answer elsewhere!      Incentives are fine, but penalties are an incredibly bad idea and   would actively hurt users and the network.   I guess this answers my question, even if I disagree with jeff.
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I'm going to ask this, even though it has some resemblance to other questions, but I think it's important to ask this question in this manner, because it has some semantic meaning that the other questions allude to but do not come out and say.  Should moderators close questions for reasons other than obvious violation of the rules?    I've been noticing a lot of closed questions by moderators lately, with only a single vote.  For example,   I did not ask the question, and i don't know the author, but something bugs me about moderators heavy handedly bypassing the community process of choosing what is and isn't a good question to ask.    True, the community can re-open a closed question, but that's a little bit like being presumed guilty until proven innocent.  I think far fewer people look at closed questions and think "that should be re-opened" than people that look at open questions and think "that should be closed".  I'm not trying to suggest that moderators should have this power taken away, just that they should voluntarily leave questions to the community unless they are obviously violating the rules.  Even good intentions can go bad because someone was in a hurry, or didn't read the question well enough.    I'm also not trying to suggest some kind of recourse for closed questions by moderators.  I think that issue goes away if moderators don't close non-violating questions solely by themselves.  I think, by default, moderators should merely be one vote to close (or migrate) questions, with an option to force close if necessary... but SOP should that moderators votes do not (normally) carry any more weight than anyone elses (again, unless it's an obvious violation of the rules).  Moderators have a purpose, and an important one at that.. but I don't think that purpose is to decide for the community that questions are duplicates or not a real question.  That's the communities job and moderators should not take it away from them.  EDIT:  I think people are missing the point.  I am not making any judgement call as to whether the actions taken by mods in any given circumstance was correct or not.  Even if the community would have done the exact same thing, it's still the communities place to make those decisions by consensus, not a single person unilaterally deciding.  Comments?
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I have a question on Super User that was closed as an exact duplicate. In my opinion this is in error, the other question is similar in that they both revolve around the presence or lack of the same feature however the two questions approach the feature from distinct use cases. At present the answer to the two questions IS the same, however in time, because their purposes differ, a third party solution could arrive to one or the other which does not solve both use cases. Having one question closed prevents it being (potentially) answered.  Admittedly, in the initial versions of the question was not worded so the differences were apparent, so it was valid to close it. Now it has been revised so the differences are clear. Adding a comment or editing and old question doesn't get fresh eyes on it, no front page exposure. So what does one do? Ask a question like this here on meta? Ask the question anew with the better phrasing?  There is another meta question asking about this, , but the theme is quite different, being about appealing a closure in the milieu of flame wars and off-topic debates.
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What's everyone's opinion on closing an older question as a duplicate of a newer one, if the newer one is clearly the better resource? I'm looking at a special case right now, where the two were posted by the same person; the  was migrated to SU before a commenter pointed out it was a . Is it considered good practice to close the older as a duplicate of the newer?  More generally, is it ok to do that for separate questions posted by different people, if the older question went unanswered but the newer has a good answer?  (I should probably mention I saw , but I think this is separate)
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Motivated by the deletion of     On one hand, I disagree with these closures, because:  These questions were (and still are) very popular They have some good information in them (or at least the first one does) and it feels like bad sportsmanship to remove good information from the internet, particularly when it was contributed by your fellow users  Number 2 in particular bothers me. A lot. On the other hand, I do agree that:  The community of 10k users should be able to decide which closed questions they wish to delete on their own without me intervening These questions should definitely remain closed, because they either have an absurd # of answers, or are duplicates (though some duplicates ). Which means they are eligible for deletion … forever. These questions wouldn't survive more than 10 minutes if asked today on Stack Overflow, so in some ways they are artifacts from the past, like dinosaurs in an era of mammals.  There is some related discussion in:   While I normally favor code solutions here, I am not sure I like the idea that once a question gets 400 upvotes it should become extremely difficult to delete. It feels like mob rule. Official policy on the blog:
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Even though a question may be closed by receiving 5 close votes, the votes do not necessarily need to agree.  I think this is a good behavior, but  (which it was) and found the question was closed as "not a real question".  This is unfortunate, while I'm happy to display my username and acknowledge that I voted to close, I'd like some additional transparency.  That is, if it was a 4-1 vote for "not a real question" vs "exact duplicate" I'd be interested in seeing that level of information.  The point is to be transparent about why the question was closed, and though 5 users may agree the question needs to be closed they may not agree why.  It's important to recognize all the reasons for closure, not just the majority reason.  I'd suggest displaying this information as something like:     closed on Jun 21 at 4:26 as:         not a real question by foo, bar, baz   exact duplicate by alice, bob      Once a question has been closed I'd argue it's more important to understand the rationale than it is to worry about an extra 2 lines of text. If the votes are 2,1,1,1 perhaps keep just 2 bullets, the first showing the majority vote, the second saying "for other reasons" as a summary of the change.  The point is to aggregate the summary by reason.
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I got  question in review. First sentence is:     I know there is a  question, but no answers.   And indeed the two questions are virtually identical. I started to flag as duplicate - but the original question had no answer at the time, so it wouldn't be correct and apparently . (I didn't go so far as to try to submit the flag).  What is the proper action here? How do we want such a question to be handled? Should both (or more) questions stay open indefinitely until either is answered and somebody gets the good idea to do the duplicate linking?   As the new question is essentially a bump to the front page (perhaps with re-tagging), especially in the case where the OP knows that a previous question exist, perhaps something should be done to enable bumping re-emphasizing without writing the new question.  As I wrote this,  actually got an answer. So the old one should now be closed as a duplicate of the new - but my question remains for the case where all known/found duplicate questions have no answer?  Ironically, just before asking this, the "Questions that may already have your answer" gave me ... (Although the suggestion has no answer). So it has been asked before - the comment there even suggest the ability to re-emphasize.
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Some questions are getting closed as duplicates - good, the system is working. Unfortunately, some are getting closed as duplicates of other questions which are already deleted. This leaves all 1-9,999 reputation users left scratching their heads when they try to view the duplicate. Even worse, imagine being the author of the question and having your question closed as a duplicate when the original question isn't accessible.  I think something is wrong. Today I undeleted a question (left it closed) since it was referenced in the close-reason for another question. Comments indicated that people were clearly irritated that they could not access the duplicate     [Comment] Ok, who thought it was a good idea to close this as duplicate of a deleted question, which most people cannot even see? For the record, I'm reopening - clearly there's enough interest in this question. – Kobi 14 hours ago   ---   [Comment] The PosibleDuplicate link is broken. Voting to reopen. – Rahul G 7 hours ago   ---   [Flag] Closed as duplicate of a deleted question, fail. Thanks for moderating. – {username removed} 14 hours ago   My undelete-action was short-lived, as a few users returned to delete the post again.  It certainly cannot be desirable to reference posts that the vast majority of users cannot even see, especially when the author of the redundant question cannot see (at the time of writing this, the author has a reputation of 18).  I'm not sure what the solution is to this, but I'd like to hear some ideas.  Questions  Question:  Duplicate of:
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Possible Duplicates:             Voting on questions played a big role in the site when we didn't have the option to comment on, close, migrate, flag, or edit questions which did not fit the site or required modification to be useful and usable.  As it is, question votes are not much more than a popularity contest, and a lot of bandwidth is taken up on Meta regarding question votes.  Notably:        In most cases a downvote is being given where a good edit should be used instead, or a comment indicating that the question user needs to provide more information.  People are also downvoting in the case of duplicates (or suspected duplicates) when they don't want to do the work of finding the duplicate.  There is no need to downvote to 'alert' other users that a question isn't worth spending time on - if it's bad enough that it can't be fixed, and so bad that you want to be sure others avoid it then it's not worth keeping open.  These are all situations where the person downvoting should be taking a different action.  , and several questions have thrown ideas at how to increase question upvoting artificially, and a  was even implemented to encourage this behavior.  Given all this, I am now convinced that voting on questions is an unnecessary distraction.  Voting no longer provides any useful information about a question, and there are more than adequate means of fixing or removing questions that need work.  Voting makes more sense for sites like Meta where questions aren't really questions, but suggestions and discussions.  For purely Q/A sites such as SO, SF, SU, the voting is superfluous.  The only two possible positive things voting now provides are:   A way for users at lower rep levels to have a voice when they are unable to perform many of the other functions that are needed to fix a question (I contend this is useless, but perhaps they need some sort of outlet) A 'hook' to get new users into the reputation game (which fails frequently because questions aren't getting upvotes, especially questions from new users)   If that is truly the case, then we should consider removing question voting altogether, or removing the effect of question votes on reputation.   Am I wrong? What obvious and explicitly important role does question voting play in our community?
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Lot of people have posted these kind of questions, but mine deals with another perspective of the same problem, so before you cry out duplicate! just hear me out.  I'm a pretty new user on Stack Overflow, and a rookie in the world of Javascript and Jquery.  So I wanted to make something clear...  So I asked some questions based on my knowledge, and what I do not understand, while other more experienced users kept pounding me down and down-voting me.  Well, in my understanding, Stack Overflow was made with the aim that anyone can ask, and anyone can answer.  Old users constantly say This is a duplicate! or Why didn't you check the FAQ!. Now let me ask you something, Will a new user go through all of the Stack Overflow just to see whether it is acceptable to you or not?  OR does he even know that we have a FAQ?  Seriously guys, if you think that a person's question are a waste of time, why do you take the time to down-vote him??  Old users should understand that we are just wanting to get an answer, and not try intimidate us. Give us some space!   I mean seriously, after getting bullied again and again , you think anyone would want to stay on longer?  I agree some new users are just there for spamming, but hey, not all of us are like that!   Just give us some breathing room, and come on, it isn't that hard to be nice to someone.
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I just happened across , which has one close vote suggesting that it be closed as an exact duplicate of .  This suggestion is perfectly correct: these are exactly identical questions asked by the same user.  However, there's not much point in closing question A as a duplicate of B, since question B has already been closed as a duplicate of A.  Yet the close vote remains, doing nothing but wasting reviewers' time.  This is not the first time I've seen this happen, so I'd like to suggest that the Stack Exchange software should do something about it.  In particular, I'd like to suggest the following feature:     When a question Y is closed as an exact duplicate of another question X, any votes or flags to close X as a duplicate of Y should be automatically discarded.   Actually, I'm kind of surprised that the SE software doesn't do that already.  If anyone else thinks that this constitutes an actual bug, feel free to retag it.
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This is a two in one question:  Should the asker of a duplicate question gain reputation for asking the duplicate question?   Should the answerers of duplicate questions gain reputation for answering them?  By asking a duplicate question you are diluting the value of the site. It takes lots of TLC to find the dupe and merge it in, yet you are still rewarded for producing that work.  The answerers of the duplicate question are also diluting the value of the site, because good and valuable information becomes splintered and harder to find.
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I know a lot of people really want to get lots of SO rep points to improve their quality of life. I get it. When I read a question, I think about whether I know the answer or not. If yes, then I take the time to write up what I deem to be a reasonable answer. If not, then I think about whether or not I want to try to figure it out. If so, and if I do, then I repeat the "know the answer" step. I don't try to flash answer questions. I'm just not the type.  But what's bugging me lately is the copy cat answerer. I read a question. Think. Formulate an answer. Then answer. This takes at least a few minutes. Four times this week, about 5-10 minutes after I post my answer (which comes 10 or more minutes after the question is posted), someone else posts the exact same answer! Even the same code with the same variable names! That's annoying. I don't really know why it bugs me so much, but there you have it. I'm annoyed.   In my annoyance, I feel like voting the answer down. But technically it's a correct answer, so I shouldn't do that. Maybe I should leave a comment? Maybe I should let it go? Probably the latter. Then again, duplicate questions are closed, why not close duplicate answers? Any suggestions?
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Situation: when a user self-marks their post as a duplicate, it shows as closed by "community" rather than the original poster.  Problems: this is not clear at all to most users of SE what has happened. It looks like the question was "mod closed" as a duplicate against the asker's wishes.    Suggestion: instead of the community user "closing" the post, have the final close user be the asker (or make it "Community &amp; Asker"). This will help clear up confusion and streamline the process for understanding what happens.