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I saw a question on Meta that was obviously going to be a duplicate:

Difference Between SO and Programmers [closed]

And indeed, looking at the "Related" questions list for that question showed a number of duplicates:

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Being the good citizen I am, I tried to vote to close (technically Flag as duplicate as I've not got the rep here to vote to close) it as an Exact Duplicate only to find myself falling into a rabbit hole of Closed, Duplicate questions. Is there any way to flag a closed question as such in the Related list?

Mostly because the first one I picked was closed as a duplicate of the second one, which was closed as a duplicate of the one that is now listed as the duplicate/linked answer.

Edit to respond to comment:

I take the point about "not voting to close on title alone", and normally wouldn't, however as the questions had identical titles, and it's pretty clear what they should be asking, I clicked the first one:

  1. What is the difference between stackoverflow and programmers.stackexchange? which lead to:
  2. What's the difference between "Programmers" and "Stackoverflow" sites? which leads to:
  3. Choosing between Stack Overflow and Programmers Stack Exchange - but I'd got bored following links and didn't check that one as the first two were identical, so assumed this was too and didn't want to see how deep the rabbit hole led.

In the related list, there's only one other question in there that is an exact duplicate, but hasn't (currently) been closed as such which is:

Reasoning for highlighting closed questions:

The "Questions with similar titles" does display the closed titles when asking the question, so it should be fairly possible to include.

If there are clearly duplicate titles, then as a reader/reviewer would be helpful to know which ones are already closed as duplicates so you can either:

  1. Use the remaining open questions to focus on which of those is the canonical answer to close this with.
  2. Use the closed questions to find the canonical answer (which failed for me with my route of clicks).
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  • I'm not sure why this matters. Surely when you visit the question linked from the "Related" sidebar it becomes apparent that it has been closed, and exactly which question it has been closed as a duplicate of? And surely you aren't voting to close questions as duplicates based solely on their titles, right?
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Mar 23, 2012 at 2:58
  • I've also submitted edits to those questions I found that link to earlier questions in the chain.
    – Zhaph - Ben Duguid
    Commented Mar 23, 2012 at 9:55
  • 1
    I can confirm that this matters. We have topics which are almost completely out of scope, but not outright banned because small areas are OK. When people ask a new question about them, they see the existing questions turn up in the "related" list and assume that their question is OK, because they see the site has them. If they could see that 90% of the related questions are closed, that would be helpful. Newest example: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/69443/…
    – rumtscho
    Commented Jun 3, 2016 at 18:00

1 Answer 1

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+50

To show [closed] will help to identify should I open related or linked question. Also closed question should have low rank in Related section.

There is also related suggestion Prevent questions closed as "off topic" or "not a real question" from showing up in the "Related" links

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