Post History

## Psychology

In sum: I think the social problems here have more to do with communication than they do with policy, and I'm extremely wary of softening policy in order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.

To be fair, sometimes people *should* feel judged for posting a duplicate question - they clearly haven't made any attempt to look for the already-existing information within the site. However, it can also easily happen that someone thinks of the same problem in different terms, and thus there is a new title or description of the same problem that is also useful to have.

In most such cases, there is either no clear advantage or disadvantage to the new phrasing; the OP should simply be pointed at the old question with a note that has a positive tone: "good news, your question appears to have an answer here already:" etc. etc.

## Marking duplicates, and other closures

Somewhere Else, marking something as a duplicate is treated by the system as a form of closure. Insofar as "closed" means "the state in which a question is publicly visible but may not receive new answers", I see no reason to diverge from that model. Recognizing a question as a duplicate *absolutely should* function as an injunction on answers. It is *crucial* to the value of a Q&A site that answers for a question are *centralized*:

* so that someone who searches for those answers can get them all at once;

* so that when those ideas are considered in the "marketplace", there is no friction in that system;

* so that answers are given equal exposure, phrased in terms of the same motivating example (if there's actually a need to refer to a specific motivating example), and otherwise compared on an apples-to-apples basis.

If people react poorly to a prohibition on "their" question receiving new answers, but "their" question is in fact the same as one that *does* qualify for new answers, then there is a need to take ego out of the equation in some form. This is entirely a social problem, not a technical problem.

If people react poorly to "their" question being "closed", *regardless of the implications of "closure"*, then evidently the problem is that terminology, not the implications. We should rephrase this, and I think that would be a good idea anyway. The other experimental phrasing for this idea is "On Hold"; I don't think this is really any better.

I don't have a clear-cut proposal here, but I do want to note that this phrasing *interacts with* policy for closing questions. If we ever reached a level of popularity, for example, where it makes sense to start out questions in a closed state just to maintain basic QC, then it would in turn make sense to use terminology like "under review", "being workshopped" etc.

## Disputing closures

The procedure laid out for us by our forbears is pretty straightforward: just as the question was nominated and confirmed for closure by a certain number of votes, it can be nominated and confirmed for reopening in the same way. While the closed question cannot receive new answers, it can be edited, including unilaterally by the OP.

My contention here is that **this system mostly works fine**. To the extent that it fails, this is a **technical problem with discoverability** of the reopening process.

Perhaps OP should be able to add a privileged note explaining why the identification as a duplicate is contested - sometimes someone in OP's position won't have an easy time editing the question, but this information can make it possible for someone else to apply the edit. In other cases, it can help commenters to explain why the target question really is a duplicate.

There definitely should be a way that curation-minded users - whether or not they have an actual Curate ability yet - can easily search for recently closed questions, and specifically for recently duplicate-marked questions, in order to review those decisions.

The system definitely needs to communicate clearly to users, in the aftermath of a closure, about what they can and should do. Ideally this process is interactive, like the initial guided tour, asking the user questions like "did you understand the linked question and did it solve your problem?" (At this point we could even softly suggest adding a "worked for me" reaction...) "Is your actual question fundamentally different? If so, how?" etc. Designing the interface for something like this requires considerable thought, and should definitely not be done "by committee" through Meta.

## The "help desk" question

Communities need to decide for themselves whether people who come in with a problem to solve and get directed to existing Q&A, are responsible for understanding how that Q&A applies to their personal situation.

If a community sees itself as offering a "help desk" to new users, then it is useful to be able to write an "answer" that references an existing Q&A and *briefly* explains how the existing Q&A applies to the current circumstance, perhaps showing the result of applying advice from the answers to the specific circumstances. There shouldn't ever be a need for more than one such answer, and technical measures should be used to prevent competition in that regard. Once the question is identified as, let's say, an *example* of a common problem, it could have an automatically generated, templated, community-wiki answer that *cites* the would-be "duplicate" and which can then be edited to add explanation (of the sort that, Somewhere Else, would be given in the comments if at all).

On the other hand, if such questions *aren't* accepted (i.e. not even in a separate category, as I've been suggesting in some other Meta Q&A), then there is no particular need for such "mercy" - just close the question as a duplicate.