What do you do when a question is asked which is a collection of other asked questions?

Question

We've had a lot of traffic for candy-box-2 today. One of the encounters is with a squirrel who poses a series of riddles. As people got stuck on various riddles, they asked questions about the problem they had (a particular riddle) and got an answer about it.

• What is the answer to the third squirrel question?
• About the “tic-tac-toe squirrel challenge”
• What is the answer to the squirrel and the yellow hat riddle?
• What is the solution to the Squirrel sequence of letters question?
• The squirrel's riddle - how many marks on the tree trunk?

Then, later, someone decided it would make sense to collect all this information in one place, so posted the question (and answered):

• What are all the correct answers to the Squirrel's questions, and what is the reward when I get them all correct?

Some users have now closed the older, singular questions as dupes of the new, consolidated question. I am not sure if this action is correct.

I am not going to attempt to be all inclusive here, but some pros and cons of having the consolidated question that I've seen listed (and may or may not agree with) are:

Pros

• It's easier to find all the answers to the squirrel's riddles if they're all in one place.
• It is a single encounter in the game, so they all should have been put together in the first place.

Cons

• Setting a precedent that it's okay to post a question composed of already-existing questions (with answers) and self-answering it could lead to rep whoring off the work of others.
• Closing the original questions as dupes may be seen as a penalty by the original askers and answerers.
• Sometimes people just want to see the one bit they're stuck on and not all the other riddles and solutions (though spoiler markup could help fix this).

There are almost certainly other pros and cons I'm missing.

What should be done? Should the consolidated question be closed (tough, since it also contains non-dupe information)? Should the original questions be closed? Should some sort of magical merge happen? Should they all simply be left open?

Answer 1

I believe that closing the original questions was wrong. If the consolidated question had come first, fine. But it didn't. What essentially happened here is that users who had valid questions and answers had those closed, and likely no further rep earned for them, because someone wanted the data all in one place. This person will now earn the rep instead (which is an unhappy byproduct and not, I think, the user's goal).

We (particularly those of us with high rep) like to pretend that the gamification aspect of the site doesn't matter, but it does. It is a large part of what draws in and retains new users. It would alienate me as a new user to have my question or answer closed as dupe of something that came in after it, particularly if my answer had been copied. It doesn't feel like fair play.

We are a question and answer site. Someone has a problem, asks it, and we give answers. They should not have to ask about parts of the squirrel encounter they had no problems with, which some people in chat implied they should have done in the first place. They should need only ask about what they have a problem with, not what they already solved.

Let me repeat that: This is a Q&A site. This is not GameFAQs. This is not a wiki. Our job is not to collect and reorganize data. Our job is simply to answer the questions that we are asked. There is an entire reputation system built around this, and these kinds of actions undermine it.

Sure, the squirrel riddles aren't all collected in one spot. So what? Neither are all the chocolate bar questions, lollipop questions, or candies questions. Should I go create some blanket questions for those so the info is all in one place? We are not a wiki. We should not go out of our way to act like one.

Answer 2

When looking at situations like these, you have to take a few factors into consideration.

• Scope: Would the scope of a combined question still be reasonable?
• Relatedness: How likely is a person looking at one question going to want the answers to another?

The squirrel questions are very reasonably scoped and highly related. Yes, a person may only want the answer to one, but they are much more likely to want the questions to two or more. Let's look at some use cases:

• User only needs help with one riddle
• User needs help with riddles 2 and 4
• User needs help with all riddles

A combined question helps each of these users exactly the same as individual questions would with the added bonus of saving those with multiple problems from having to look for each individual question.

The "which came first" aspect is part of the gamification aspect of SE and should not override higher quality content. I'll touch more on this in a minute, right now let's address your cons:

Setting a precedent that it's okay to post a question composed of already-existing questions (with answers) and self-answering it could lead to rep whoring off the work of others.

This is the biggest problem here, but can easily be solved: Make the combined question community wiki. Yes, this is a pain, but if users are actually gaining rep off of someone else's work, it's the solution. You should also consider the precedent that encouraging smaller separate questions sets in regards to rep-whoring. You can gain rep a lot faster via 5 questions than you can via 1.

Closing the original questions as dupes may be seen as a penalty by the original askers and answerers.

This is an unavoidable consequence of all closures. Closing is not a punishment. We don't let this stop of from closing in any other case and neither should we here.

Sometimes people just want to see the one bit they're stuck on and not all the other riddles and solutions (though spoiler markup could help fix this).

Well, you said it before I could. This just so happens to be a perfect use of spoiler markup. Plain and simple.

Now, back to why consolidated questions can be higher quality:

Example 1: Game has a boss with 5 stages

Would it be better to ask:

• How do I beat form 1?
• How do I beat form 2?
• How do I beat form 3?
• How do I beat form 4?
• How do I beat form 5?

or

How do I beat the boss?

The single question is obviously better. Why? Because everyone that has a problem with 1 form is going to encounter the other forms immediately after. Each of these problems will be faced in quick succession. Not only that, but strategies for later forms could be dependent on strategies from previous forms. It is of better service to the users to have them all in one place rather than forcing them to navigate to each question.

If a single question were to come after each individual question, I'd VTC the individual ones in a heartbeat CPU cycle.

Example 2: Game has a boss that is fought 5 times over the course of a game.

In this case, it would be better to have separate questions. Why? The scope is too broad. A single question here would be asking about multiple points in the game potentially with hours in between them. Characters might have chances to greatly diverge in this time and one answer that adequately covered all the potential situations would be unwieldy.

If a single question were to come up in this example, I'd VTC it as Too Broad.

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At the end of the day, we are about helping people. Assuming all the answers are correct, individual questions are just as helpful as a single consolidated question, but a single question can help in a much easier way. A single question meets all the needs of individual questions and has added bonuses that individual questions cannot provided: Ease of navigation.

Answer 3

A better and wider duplicate question is still a duplicate question and should be closed as one even if it collects information into one place in a useful manner. Showing a green light for collecting old already-answered questions together into a new question is not a good idea and it would alienate new users (and even some of the regulars) from the site.

Remember that one question can be flagged as a duplicate of many questions (1 per close-vote if I'm not mistaken) and all of those questions will be linked in the little duplication box. It's also a lot less work to close one question than it is to go around closing a bunch of them.

Arguing that making a collective question is the right thing to do to make the information more easily available is the wrong thing to do, because that's exactly what the 'Related' and 'Linked' sections are at the side of a question. If a closely related question (such as another squirrel puzzle) is not in Related, post it as a comment and it will be under Linked! It should be enough for questions to be linked through tags and the sidebar and I know a lot of people use the sidebar for just that.

We should not be taking the possibility to get into the community away from new users, and making collective questions is doing just that. It's already hard enough to gain the first reputation to get going within the community. Let's not make it harder.

Answer 4

I like to think of this situation as a variant of the Fastest Gun in the West problem. We get a lot of borderline trivial questions that are all closely related together. They gain the right answers anyway, maybe a vote here and there, but the information would probably be better off grouped together.

In this case, someone made a question and answer that encompasses all the trivial questions, and the others were closed as duplicates. So what are we left with? A genuinely good question and answer that expertly covers the topic at hand. The low quality, trivial questions closed as duplicates. This is the system working as intended

Arqade is a question and answer site for passionate videogamers on all platforms. [snip] With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about videogames and videogame consoles.
- The about page, (emphasis my own)

The only issue I think you're having is the source of the information. It smells like rep-stealing off of the Trivial question askers & answerers. The reason you think this is the OP says in the comments that he pieced it together from the other questions and answers on this site. But why is this a problem?

If he had instead pieced it together from a few forum posts as well as personal experience, and was oblivious to the existence of the trivial questions, Would you still feel that the trivial questions shouldn't be closed as dupes of the (obviously) better question?

As Billy Mailman states in his answer:

The point of Stack Exchange sites is to become repositories of all the useful information that can be gathered on a given topic.

Your main 'Con' point:

Setting a precedent that it's okay to post a question composed of already-existing questions (with answers) and self-answering it could lead to rep whoring off the work of others.

There is no precedent. This situation will come up so little that it isn't a way to 'game' the system. If it's too much info, the question will be closed as 'too broad'. If it's too little, then why were the questions separated in the first place?

In conclusion, The point of this site is not the rep, it's not about 'who was first' or the 'Fastest Gun', it's about providing high-quality, expert answers to problems. The rep is simply a bonus. The trivial questions should remain dupes of the expert-question.

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Related Side Note: Something I'm always confused about is people getting really upset about duplicate questions (and subsequently downvoting them), mostly because they see them as a) 'no research' (you couldn't find this?!?) or b) 'not useful' (We already answer this!!). Which is (most of the time) not true on either count:

a) Everyone's brain works differently, what might be an obvious search query to us might not be so obvious to them, or their English may be poor and they cannot put their question into the words we would naturally use.
b) Duplicate questions are useful to the site. They help people that may come across the same problem find the answer quicker - giving more than one way of phrasing a question means there's more than one way they can find the answer they need. This is why we don't delete duplicates.

Answer 5

Creating a single, unified question like this is the right thing to do. It would have been better if it had come along before all the others cropped up, but now that it exists, we should close the others as duplicates, and keep them as such. They still help guide people here if they search Google for a specific question, but we really don't need each one collecting its own set of answers.

Remember, people: We are not just a question and answer site. We are not here just to help the people asking the questions. That is a secondary concern. We are here to help as many people as we possibly can, by getting the best possible answers to the questions we have. In fact, helping future visitors is so important to Stack Exchange, there used to be an entire network-wide close reason just for when a question didn't have lasting value. Literally everyone who encounters one of these Squirrel questions is going to encounter the rest, and may very well have troubles with them. We should do our best to help those people out as much as possible; the big link at the top of each question pointing to the general version is perfect for this.

The point of Stack Exchange sites is to become repositories of all the useful information that can be gathered on a given topic. By putting this information together, we not only make it easier to find, but we also make it easier to collaborate on. We have wiki-like features for a reason. By pooling information into a single answer, we make it more likely that any future changes to the game will all be incorporated in, whereas keeping the questions separate means that we might get two of them changed after an update, but never notice the other three.