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I just realized that there are several questions on Stack Overflow with very similar titles, such as Generics in Java and Java Generics (capitalization may differ). Today, Can I add to a generic collection of type A values of type B ,which extends A, without any special syntax? was asked; in my opinion it covered exactly the same ground as one of the previous questions. (the OP has since modified the title.)

If a user asks a question with exactly the same title as a previous one, then this cannot be a good thing:

  1. The questions are the same, in which case it would be a duplicate.
  2. They are not the same, in which case they should not have the same title.

The second point might be relaxed to allowing questions to have identical titles if their main tags (tags with highest frequency) are different (e.g. one is about Java, while the other is about Python).

Could something like this be implemented? Do other people here think this is useful? Do you have arguments against it?

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    Well the other questions do show up in the related questions section once you've entered the title so the user is clearly ignoring all these.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 9:35
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    This is a terrible idea.
    – NullUserException อ_อ
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 6:46
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    Has this been implemented?
    – user1228
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 13:17
  • @Won'tಠ_ಠ I would say yes.
    – Chris Frederick
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 18:50

1 Answer 1

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This is much more widespread than I thought. I added a call-to-arms. I think the simple answer to your points is, if titles are duplicates, this should be a flashing red light that these questions should be flagged as duplicates or edited to improve quality.

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  • There are 10,881 question pairs with identical titles on Stack Overflow.
    – M. Tibbits
    Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 15:32
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    Good Golly Ms. Molly. I suggest making your comment part of your answer.
    – user50049
    Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 17:18
  • I like how "Help with SQL query" is apparently an extremely popular title (used 13 times). But it seems that your query counts all possible pairs for this question meaning 91 of them? Which is even more extreme for "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 7:47
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    Much slower query but more accurate results I guess: there are 5,827 question titles used more than once.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 7:58

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