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If a question is closed as duplicate of another, and later the original question itself is deleted, shouldn't the "[closed]" marking on duplicated question vanish? I think it does automatically as per read once somewhere on meta, but here is a case

duplicate: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/617489/whats-your-favorite-windows-text-editor

original: what-are-the-good-free-programming-text-editors-for-windows

The latter is no more. Not to say that the former is a sound question, but simply the current marking is wrong. Not sure if its some bug..

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  • From the revision history it seems that the duplicate message was manually edited in. It is not an automatic duplicate message by the Community user.
    – Bart
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:26
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    @Bart: In 2009, there weren't automated duplicate messages.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:26
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    @animuson You've been here far too long. ;)
    – Bart
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:27
  • @Bart but the question is eventually closed. There is [duplicate] marking on the question. Is it fair since the original is no more?
    – nawfal
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:29

2 Answers 2

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Generally, if the original question gets deleted, that's a good indication that the duplicate should also be deleted. There may be rare cases where this is not true, but in this case it certainly is true.

The system notifies users when they attempt to delete a question which has other questions marked as a duplicate of it (an "Are you sure?" confirmation dialog). This dialog is meant to prevent this from happening, and get users to either leave it there or go to the other questions and delete and/or reopen them. This obviously didn't happen in this case.

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  • yes thats sad, but now what can we do about this? to make it better? Is there a way to close that question as a duplicate of this: windows-based-text-editors?
    – nawfal
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:35
  • [status-completed]
    – jscs
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 20:23
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That was an old closure, the duplicate link was manually inserted, so the system wouldn't even know that it should be removed.

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  • I don't believe the system makes any attempt at all to remove duplicate boxes when an original gets deleted, so the fact that it was manually inserted doesn't really make any difference.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:28
  • @Daniel but the question is eventually closed. There is [duplicate] marking on the question. Is it fair since the original is no more?
    – nawfal
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 19:30

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