Duplicate Questions: A New Look

Question

A long-standing de facto rule has come about over the course of Arqade's existence. The sentiment here is that any two questions asking for the same information are necessarily duplicates. I can understand the appeal of that stance. It's easy to understand, easy to apply, and doesn't require much maintenance or effort.

Unfortunately, there are some edge cases where this rule is utterly counterproductive to our main goal: Help gamers get answers to their gaming questions. Our rules exist to streamline this process, to organize and facilitate it. The rules exist to serve our ability to help users. The users come first, and when the rules act in such a way that it hurts users, we need to take a step back and look at what's going wrong.

You may ask, "Well, what about off topic questions? What about game recommendations? Closing those questions hurts users." But it doesn't really. Closing questions like that acknowledges what we're weak at, what we're strong at, and helps us focus the content on the website so that experts with the knowledge to help users with the right kinds of questions don't have to wade through a sea of unrelated questions to do so. Overall, closing questions correctly helps the kinds of users we set out to help.

That being said, here are some things that can go wrong in the close process specifically in regards to a user asking a question that has already been asked:

1. There is no answer yet on the existing question.
2. The existing question has an answer, but that answer doesn't help the new asker.
   • The answer is outdated.
   • The answer is wrong.
   • The questions have a subtle difference in focus.
   • The existing answer isn't sufficiently detailed to help the new asker.

In all of these cases, assuming the asker has a correct on topic question that would not have been closed in isolation, closing the question hurts the asker. In a case like this, we are putting the perceived rules of the site ahead of our primary goal of helping users. To be the asker in this case must leave the sourest of tastes in your mouth.

Historically, we've told users to bounty the old question, or even had existing high rep users bounty the old question, in an effort to get updated or complete answers. Nobody should be required to spend reputation just to ask a question, however. Brand new users who have just run across our site for the first time can ask questions; there should not be such a restriction here. (I'm not so sure about how much I like the bounty system in general, but that's a topic for another time.)

StackExchange implemented a change which was controversial at the time, to disallow duplicate votes if the target question does not have any upvoted answers. This change was the first step in this direction of trying to put helping users first.

To quote a StackExchange employee directly:

...the proof is in the answers. If the question looks the same, but the answers aren't solving the asker's problem, that is not a dupe – that is a legitimate new question. Neither the person asking nor the person who lands from Google cares if the question has been asked before: they care if it has been answered.

So, rather than a de facto rule that hurts users for the sake of having "clean" rules, I would like to try out a de jure rule: Do not close questions as duplicates if the target question does not help the new asker. See the list above for the set of circumstances to which I see this applying initially.

I propose that, starting as soon as possible, we enact this rule on the site on a trial basis. We won't know whether it works or not until we try it out. Will there be issues? Certainly. I can already see some of them coming. But it is worth ironing out those issues for the sake of the users who have legitimate questions, when we have legitimate means of helping them.

If we go for it, this will require a period of adjustment. Please take to meta to help clarify this policy, so that we can work together to develop a practice that both helps users and has clear rules. In the case that we do give it a try, we would reconsider whether this has been a success or a failure in January 2017. I want to put a hard time limit on the experiment so we can come to a conclusion and not languish around forever in a land of instability.

So, I leave it to you. Shall we start this experiment, or should I just shut up and accept the status quo?

Answer 1

I agree with the idea in general, and I've argued for some subset of this in the past. The most problematic case in my view was the one where the new question is a very specific one, and closed as a duplicate of a broad one that didn't actually contain any answer to the specific question.

I'd still make some adjustments to this rule, I think closing actually exact duplicates should still be the first choice as long as they're actually identical, especially if they're of a similar age. We don't want to have a dozen identical "Pokemon Go just nuked my account" questions just after an update, or something like that.

Answer 2

Yeah I'm with Frank on this one. There are plenty of ways to search for questions about a specific game, search using game tags and rephrasing your question in the search bar. There's also nothing wrong with just not being able to find the dupe on your own and having your question marked as such.

I think our efforts for closing questions would be more benefitial to the site if we focused on something that addresses questions that are flooding in such as these:

I can't log into my account

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/275137/i-cant-log-back-into-my-pokemon-go-account?rq=1

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/275644/cant-log-back-into-account?rq=1

Why can't I log back in to my Training Club Account on Pokemon Go?

We need to be more up-front about log-in issues / server instabilities and how we shouldn't be a dumping ground for questions that don't belong here.

I would be much more in favor of focused efforts elsewhere and not worrying about blurring the lines on what a duplication is.

Answer 3

My 2 cents.

That comes straight from the Low Quality Review Queue prompts for a reason to suggest deletion of an answer. To me, this indicates that if the question is indeed different, then we should accept it as a new question. The user however, should show how it is a different question. The new question is when is a question different? This is immediately obvious when asking about two dissimilar things, but harder when asking about related things.

Here is an analogy that might help clear things up. If I go to the doctor because I am sick, and at the doctor's office I tell them my symptoms and the doctor says, oh I just had a guy come in with those same symptoms let me give you the medicine I gave him, I would be a little worried, because there are a lot of different sicknesses that share symptoms. The other guy could've just had a cold and I have hay fever or something, but because we both had a runny nose, the doctor gives me some cold medicine that won't help my hay fever. Hay fever and a cold are two very different things.

A similar thing could happen in questions. Two very different things (X, Y) could be preventing two different people from doing the same thing (Z). Is not being able to do Z the problem, or are X and Y two different problems? Are these two questions different; "I can't do Z (get's answer for problem Y which works)" and "I can't do Z, but it is not because of Y"? I don't think we should be closing problems as duplicates because they have the same symptoms, when it has been demonstrated that the problem creating that symptom is not the same.

Do note, I am not proposing that saying "hurdur other answers don't work" is acceptable to prove that the problem is different. As @MattEllen said they should provide an explanation of why the other answers were not applicable to their problem. Nor am I proposing that duplicate questions should just be left there. If they are indeed asking the exact same thing, and have the same problem, they should be closed as duplicates.

However, if a new question gets asked about something that was already asked, but the answer on the old question is wrong, outdated (basically the same thing as wrong), or poor quality, instead of duping the new question to the old question (this isn't really helpful because in the case of really old questions the op of both the question and the answer could be inactive), we should simply link the old question in the comments to be closed as a dup to the new question to close once the new question gets a better answer. Yes, this will require more work, but I think it is worth it to improve the quality of the site.

Okay, maybe that was more than 2 cents.
TLDR: Close duplicate questions as duplicates, don't close questions as duplicates that aren't duplicates, and don't close questions as duplicates to outdated questions

Answer 4

So having fallin victim to this with my question: with hardcore mode set if your guide dies is he dead forever (deleted need 10k to see) being marked as a dupe of Can NPCs really die? I am all for this change.

• The old question did not answer my question.
• The game had changed significantly in the 2 years between the questions.
• I did not have the rep to bounty the old question.
• Putting a bounty on the old question still wouldn't of gotten an answer to my specific question.

It turned out in the end that there was a bug in the version I was playing on where if you were playing on anything but medium size/softcore char, npc's would sometimes, and only sometimes, not re-spawn if they were killed in an invasion until another invasion had happened and been defeated.

So yea I totally support this as someone very active across a lot of SE but more lurkish on Arqade because... well... you guys haven't seemed to have adapted your rules to your source material nearly as well as places like Sci-fi or World-Building. Not every site needs to carbon copy SO's rules.

Answer 5

I disagree with this suggestion. It moves the focus from content curation, the whole point of moderation abilities, to helping users. While that is one focus many users have, its not actually what SE is about. We're here to provide high quality content that withstands the test of time. Like a giant encyclopedia.

By allowing duplicates that ask the same thing, we're deliberately breaking one of the main reasons SE was created to address: finding a solution to your problem without having to read pages and pages of threads. We're just reproducing the problem, SE style.

Additionally, we're allowing magic word syndrome to come into play here. Someone could post the exact same question, and just append, "the answers didn't work for me" to make it allowable. That's not only breaking our entire process, but also fundamentally does a disservice to the asker. I can't count how many times we've duped questions of that nature, where the asker states the answers don't work, only to find out they didn't actually try anything. Lack of effort on the asker's part isn't a reason to keep their questions.

At the end of the day, the whole point of duplicates is to aggregate solutions to the same problem into one question. I don't see how splitting our effort to solve the problem across multiple questions helps us, the askers, or any future readers. Write once, read many. Not write many times, search multiple questions until one actually has your answer.

Answer 6

The de-facto way of responding to a duplicate vote to a question that you do not believe to be a duplicate is by editing the question, adding something like:

Are thingies thingies? is related, but doesn't solve this problem, because it doesn't address hardcore mode and is about a fastly outdated version of the game. The accepted answer suggests to click the thingy button, but that button no longer exists.

Simply screaming "that is not a duplicate" is not helpful in any way, and does not address why that Q&A does not answer your specific question. I agree that we should not close questions as a duplicate of an other question that does not answer the question of OP. However, it is the responsibility of OP to explain why that question doesn't answer their question.

We want to help OP, but we want to keep the site clean too. Closing a question as a duplicate of an other question that would usually answer OP's question is infinitely better than just letting that question sit around unanswered forever. In the first case people coming from Google will have some form of help, where in the latter case they see a Q&A with no answer... If someone that could answer the question thinks it is a duplicate of an other question, there is no reason to believe a random person googling would believe that it isn't a duplicate and would be helped by the duplicate question.

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The other point that is mentioned that questions should not be closed as a duplicate of an aggregate question. I strongly disagree with this. Aggregate questions exist, because they describe a common situation with many possible ways it can surface. Not closing as a duplicate will cause a lot of (essentially) plagiarism and duplicate answers. Just because the aggregate question does not specifically mention the exact problem that is mentioned in the current question doesn't mean it doesn't have the same cause, and doesn't mean the same answer applies. For example, if someone posts a question about not being able to play Pokemon GO, mentioning something that is obviously server related, but not currently explicitly mentioned in the aggregate Q&A, doesn't mean I won't close it/flag it as a duplicate of that aggregate question.

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A point that is not mentioned, which might only apply to stackoverflow, is when a crap question is closed as a duplicate of an other question ("This question is very unclear, but OP probably meant what is said in this duplicate."). That's probably the only bad reason to close as a duplicate, because when the duplicate question does not answer OP's question, you simply can't reopen it (it should be closed as "unclear what you are asking" instead). When you close an unclear question, just vote for "unclear what you are asking" and wait for OP to clarify what they actually meant. Even if the question turns out to be a duplicate, at least we can reopen it when the question is readable and clear.

Answer 7

agreed that we need revision on the general forum.... users such as the first one to jump to a reply mr frank will jump for a chance to close topics not caring that having questions closed is discouraging to other users of the general stack exchange...users repeatedly having questions closed for any reason is likely to cause people to abandon the forum as a waste of time which also means they will no doubt not be aiding to the other users because they could not get aid themselves in their time of need .... I feel only admins should be able to close questions ever....it is not like these small text files are any kind of burden on the general stack exchange resources at a mere 5k or so each....and so what if there is three or four similar posts that exist if a user is asking they likely have been to a few more different websites already especially after having been discouraged the way I have been by this type of action. personally I will go to gamefaqs before coming here for game advice or even call on the manufacturer of a game.... new protocol needs to be put in place to a dire degree these forums are lucky to recieve any contributions from myself once a month if im bored while I am on disability and have all day that I could otherwise be running through these forums and helping...all because of the anxious ban hammers of those few terrible users.....there should be a flag for admins to ban accounts of users who abuse the ability to shut down posts....