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Possible Duplicate:
Give an incentive for finding duplicate questions

I've noticed that finding an exact duplicate of a question and voting to close is an act of real research on the part of the closer, and generally demonstrates better research effort than the answers do. But typically an answer will be accepted and receive a few upvotes, for more experience, when really it shouldn't have been answered in the first place. This further creates the conflict that if someone finds an exact duplicate, they are encouraged to more or less paraphrase the best answer and repost.

I would propose finding an exact duplicate and closing a question to award experience. As for details I'm not sure - only if question is closed? For each person who votes to close as an exact duplicate of the question you linked? How much rep? But seems like the right idea.

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    "experience"? How many questions do I need to close to gain a level? ;-) – Joachim Sauer Jan 22 '13 at 16:12
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    @LittleBobbyTables so yes, that's what I was looking for but didn't find while searching, but this isn't actually ironic, it's in fact pretty consistent with what I'm saying that finding duplicates is a real act of research. – djechlin Jan 22 '13 at 16:13
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    We already have more than 46.000 questions with close votes on Stack Overflow. stackoverflow.com/review We don't really need more incentive to increase this. – Bo Persson Jan 22 '13 at 16:24
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    Eh, maybe the Related Links sidebar needs to be incorporated better into the Questions that may already have your answer section on the Ask Question screen, since it took all of 10 seconds to find the possible duplicate in the sidebar. – LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir Jan 22 '13 at 16:24
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    @BoPersson: voting to close for some reason and finding a good exact duplicate are two entirely different things. Voting to close as NARQ is easy (and it should be, because many "questions" are NARQ), but finding the post that describes the exact same problem and (ideally) has useful answers is HARD. And there is no reward for that hard work at the moment. – Joachim Sauer Jan 22 '13 at 16:26
  • @LittleBobbyTables that's possible as it's happened to me several times that the dup is RIGHT THERE in the sidebar but not in the "possible related questions." – djechlin Jan 22 '13 at 16:28
  • @BoPersson Er...we always need more and better close votes. There is lots of unclosed crap on the site. Alas the "better" part is hard to come by, and we still close too many things that are fixable or simple OK. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 22 '13 at 18:00