Does damaging an enemy ship reduce the amount of scrap found? had been closed as a duplicate of How can I maximise the amount of scrap I collect?.
While it's been reopened now, I'd still like to get the general stance on this - as per the Dr. Strangedupe blog post and probably many other blog and meta.SO posts, questions are only duplicates if they ask for precisely the same thing, not for specific concise subsets, correct?
One question is about general strategy. The other is about a specific mechanic that happens to be something that could be taken into account in an answer about general strategy.
These are not duplicates. We don't serve anyone well by trying to force them to be. The reality is that asking for updates to an old question for new info most often fails. As the answerer of that other question with 20+ up votes, I can say that I do NOT know the answer to the specific mechanics question, but that did not stop me from being able to leave a useful answer about general strategy. I will not be able to update my other answer to include the info he wants because it is much more narrow and focused.
Who, exactly, does it help to force this to be a duplicate? Who does it hurt if we don't? Lets not forget our goal is to help people. Yes, obvious duplicates should be closed. This is not an obvious duplicate. It is simply a related question. Lets not doom it to never receiving answer simply because a broader question could maybe kind of sorta cover it.
Duplicate information in answers (in part or in whole) does not automatically make questions duplicates.
There are two problematic issues when closing a specific question as a duplicate of a broader one:
If the broader one does not already answer the specific issue, even though it would be part of a complete answer, this looks like a pretty hostile move to the user asking the new question. We're essentially telling him that his question should be already answered in that other post, but it isn't and there is nothing except adding a bounty he can do to encourage a better answer. We're applying an ideal standard, where the broader question has a comprehensive answer that would help the asker of the newer, specific question, while in practical terms we're rather unhelpful and pretty much appear to refuse to answer the question.
If the answer is contained in the broader question, there is still the issue that it might be somewhat hidden among other information. In the worst case we're telling the use that his question is answered over there, but he has to search for himself where in those several pages the actual answer is. This issue applies also to all people that find the question via search engines, a specific answer to a specific question can be more useful than a comprehensive guide. If we hide the answers to specific questions in large guides, we're reintroducing the same problem of having to wade through a whole forum thread that Q&A sites were meant to solve.
Closing as a duplicate is probably a good idea if the specific question is already answered in the broad one, and if it isn't too hidden among other stuff. If it is unanswered or too hard to find in the more comprehensive answer, we should not close. The drawback of the duplication is minimal, we're causing more harm than we benefit in such cases.
=, not >. Nowhere that I'm aware of does the word "scope" appear in any policy statement about duplicates. What I am aware of says that duplicates are the same question, nothing about general and specific scopes. Where does this "scope" idea come from?
Jul 3, 2013 at 16:00
We should not be closing as duplicate anything except exact duplicates. Closing as a "duplicate" of a different question that would not naturally attract the same information as the new question is actually harder, and less likely to create quality answers, than just answering the new question and linking the other as "Related."
It's also not prompt, and requires a bunch of editorial work that circumvents the answer-voting system to make sure the new question is properly answered. Using duplicate closing for only near-duplicates means embarking on this process:
Collect close votes, possibly involving a lot of comment discussions or a meta post.
Select an answer on the old question to be the new home of the correct answer to the new question. This introduces significant issues:
Which answer needs to be edited? The accepted one? (What if the checkmark is later moved to a different answer? What if there is no accepted answer?) All answers? A new answer?
The editing user is effectively deciding that this new info being edited in is correct. That's not their job; that's the voting system's job. This eliminates competition to submit the best answer to the new question.
(Optional and usually not done) Edit the old question to specify that the info asked for in the new question is required in new answers, so that future answers on the old question properly cover the new question. This is necessary because open questions are never "dead" and can always attract and accept better answers than what's already there. Not doing this, the new question's needs are invisible and don't leverage our core system (voting) to attract the best possible answer.
Of course, this step wouldn't be necessary if it was an exact dup. You can tell when it's not an exact dup when this step is needed to ensure that future answers to the old question properly cover the new question.
Compare that with this process for near-dups:
The latter is clearly faster, but more importantly, lets the voters decide what is a correct and good answer. The more convoluted our human processes are, the more prone they are to judgement errors and quality issues.
There tends to be at least two viewpoints when it comes to dupes like this. There's the specific question side, and there's the game mechanic side. This is what's coming into play here. We have the new question being specific, and we have the game mechanic question designed to handle the entire scrap mechanic.
The specific question type is generally what we get here from new users, as they have their specific problem with a game, and they're just looking for an answer. This is the narrower viewpoint, and is scoped precisely for the user. This is their exact scenario, and they're looking for a answer on how the game plays out in a specific use-case.
In the best case scenario, this hasn't been asked at all in either form, we can let it stand, and everyone's happy. The wonky bits happen when we get specific questions, and we already have a general question about that mechanic.
The game mechanic side looks at the entire mechanic behind the question. How does X work? What can I do to influence this to my advantage? Are there related mechanics I can game to influence and gain an advantage? This has no actual scenario attached to it, because it's looking for everything that influences this mechanic. In a perfect world, we'll catch every variable attached to the mechanic, and note how it's influenced by it.
Therein lies the clash between the two viewpoints. We have a question about a specific scenario, and how it influences scrap. We also have a general question about scrap, and how to maximize your gain of such. The specific scenario being discussed is encompassed inside this question, we've just had the bad luck of this variable not being addressed in the general question. If it had been answered, and wasn't buried, this wouldn't even be a problem. We'd dupe it and leave it.
When we get such a clash, I think what we should be doing is figuring out how much effort it would take to update our existing answers to take that scenario into account. If it would take two or three paragraphs or more to fully answer that scenario, I say don't dupe it. That amount of information can be extremely useful, and will help anyone else who needs it. If adding a sentence or two can account for that entire scenario, though, that's a modicum of effort to encompass the extra scenario. For that, I say dupe the specific question to the general mechanic one, and update the answer to include it.
Now, the question is, how much effort would it take to update our general question with this specific information?
