reviewing answers, when answers are correct but duplicates

Question

Reviewing answers, I recently experienced the following workflow problem:

There is a late or first answer and when I click "review", I get the complete question (but without tags, which is a different topic, but in many cases a vital information - think regex in Perl, sed, Postgresql, Python, ... with the subtle differences).
But I find fine answers, and would vote them up. But I got suspicious, that such an answer hasn't been posted before - for old questions though, but even for new questions, experienced users are normally faster.

So I middle-clicked: open in new tab, and there I could see, that other answers already gave the same advice in other words, often upvoted and accepted.

So in this context, another valid answer is just noise and traffic. I used the opportunity to make a comment, that we don't need duplicated answers, but it is not comfortable to find this information, as a reviewer.

I think, we need nearly always the whole thread, except if the answer can be clearly judged as false or spam. Having all the information at hand at once would encourage to look for the answer in the context.

Maybe the review can be more sensible, and only show the answer in context, if there is already an upvoted and accepted answer.

Answer 1

Short answer

Indeed, I suggest that we Allow Flagging as Duplicate for answers as well.

Long answer

I encounter this problem as well. Most of the time, I end up writing a comment to explain to the new users that their answers are not valuable if it doesn't bring anything new to the thread. Then how SO works and what they should try to do when replying to a question.

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the issue. Those threads keep growing with identical or similar answers that sometimes have almost nothing different compare to the previous or accepted ones. Some new users even post on very old thread with nothing new to bring in. I found that a bit annoying when reviewing those post.

• I can downvote them, but their answer is not really bad, they are just already there.
• I could still flag them and write my own comment to explain the problem, but I'm not sure how it would be handle.

That's why I believe it would be a good idea to have a Duplicated option in the Flagging pop-up for answers as well.

I also tried to find any other post specifically related to this on Meta, but it wasn't addressed in the same way as you did.

Proposed improvement to flagging, for answers

Is there any reason to ever have an answer duplicated in a question?

EDIT:

I found this answer posted by JimmyPena that would actually give some ideas related to this.