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When a question is deleted, any questions that are closed as a duplicate of that question should also be deleted. This should be a rule at least on regular sites. Meta sites could be a little different, since duplicates on metas may not be exact duplicates, but problems arising from that will constitute such an edge case that they're probably not worth handling specially.

This post originally asked what to do with questions closed as duplicates of deleted questions, but I found "Duplicate of...[deleted post]" almost immediately after asking, so I have reworked it to request the feature Shog9 suggested in an answer there.

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    If the question ends up being undeleted, will the dupes be restored? (If not, why not?) Also, maybe we need to special-case questions with zero or one non-upvoted answers, since the owner's deletion vote is binding in that case. – Frédéric Hamidi Oct 18 '11 at 20:44
  • perhaps they could also consider alternative approach of simply auto-reopening rather than auto-delete – Some Helpful Commenter Oct 18 '11 at 20:45
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    @ConradFrix Auto-reopening probably wouldn't work. If the "original" question was deleted, it was likely off-topic or otherwise unsuitable. Its duplicates would therefore also be unsuitable and reopening them without review could be problematic. – Adam Lear♦ Oct 18 '11 at 20:55
  • @ConradFrix, if you check this question's revision history, you'll see that I considered auto-reopen. I decided against suggesting it for the reasons Anna gave. You could make the case that some questions on meta sites might deserve reopening rather than deletion, but that's what I'm calling an edge case. – Pops Oct 18 '11 at 21:02
  • @AnnaLear well if you insist on review before auto-reopen then I would hope you would want review before auto-delete – Some Helpful Commenter Oct 18 '11 at 21:10
  • @Conrad, questions closed as duplicates usually have little value (besides a link to the more "canonical" question, which I do agree can be useful to provide an alternate search path to that question and its answers). They're merged otherwise. However, auto-deleting only removes that alternate path, so reviewing is probably not that important. Back to your point, since there can be multiple duplicates targeting the same question, which one would you reopen when the target question is deleted? – Frédéric Hamidi Oct 18 '11 at 21:21
  • @FrédéricHamidi perhaps once a question has been marked as the target of a dup it shouldn't be allowed to be deleted unless the mod repoints the other dups or deletes the other refs, rather than cascading the delete or reopen – Some Helpful Commenter Oct 18 '11 at 21:27
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    @ConradFrix I'm not a fan of the deletion proposal either, to be honest, but if a question is a duplicate and the original is deleted, is there any need to keep the duplicate? I dunno. – Adam Lear♦ Oct 18 '11 at 22:31

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