A moderator on one of the Stack Exchange sites provided the following answer regarding how one should determine whether or not a question is an "exact duplicate" or not:
Forget the "exact" wording. Whether a question is a duplicate of another can be answered by reviewing what information would be required to generally cover each question. If a good answer (even if such an answer doesn't exist yet) to one of the questions would cover the basics of the other question they can be closed as duplicates.
This seems to me to be out of step with what is explained in What is an exact duplicate?.
Exact Duplicate means that the question asked is the same question as one that has been asked before (the answers are irrelevant). In most cases, this means that the new question will be about a 95% match to the original.
The words "Exact Duplicate" are used because people find many reasons to vote to close questions as duplicates that are not really duplicates, such as:
- Questions that cover similar ground, but are not really asking the same question.
- Questions that have answers that answer the supposed duplicate, but the question is different.
- Questions that duplicate a question asked on another SE site.
Am I missing something or is the moderator being too loose in the guidelines he is suggesting for closing questions as duplicates?