Changes to "close as duplicate" (part deux)

Question

I feel like we got off on the wrong foot. Due to me being an idiot miscommunication, a partial change snuck out early, and even though we announced it we didn't really explain why we made the change. So let me just start over...

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We've made some changes to Close as Duplicate.

First, some background: we're taking a look at closing behavior and trying to figure out how to make it less jarring for new users. Our goals are (1) to make it clear to people why their question got closed and (2) to make it obvious what they can do to fix it or get better (3) in order to reduce the likelihood of getting into an argument about whether this should have been closed.

We started with dupes. The old close reason looked like this:

Closed as Exact Duplicate by David Fullerton♦ 1 min ago

This question covers exactly the same content as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.

That's okay as instructions to the person voting to close, but it doesn't tell the user anything. Worse, it sounds a bit like those old forum stickies that said “PLEASE SEARCH BEFORE POSTING YOUR QUESTION” – somebody already asked this exact same thing, so please stop bothering us. It's strong wording practically invites the user to argue: "My question is not identical! I used different words!"

So what do we want to tell the user instead? Something like, “Somebody already asked this. If that other question doesn't solve your problem, please clarify your question to explain how it's different.” Perfect: if the other question helps them, they're happy because they got an answer. If the other question doesn't help them, they know exactly what to do. No argument about how exact an "exact duplicate" needs to be.

Now, notice that this is subtly different from saying "If that other question isn't asking the exact same thing as yours..." That's because the proof is in the answers. If the question looks the same, but the answers aren't solving the asker's problem, that is not a dupe – that is a legitimate new question. Neither the person asking nor the person who lands from Google cares if the question has been asked before: they care if it has been answered.

So here are the changes we made:

1. We've changed the instructions everywhere to indicate that the answers to the original question must solve the dupe’s problem. That means that the original must have an answer ^†

2. When a question gets closed as dupe, instead of just saying "Possible duplicate", we now indicate "This question already has an answer here".

3. If the owner comes back and edits their closed question, it will automatically go into a reopen queue. There's even special UI to compare before and after and see what changed.

4. The "Close-as-dupe" popup now makes it much easier to find dupes with answers by allowing you to search and preview questions and answers within the popup.

5. We now show "[duplicate]" in the question title everywhere, instead of "[closed]".

^† There are some exceptions to the requirement that the original have answers. First, mods can close as dupe of anything, to handle any special cases. Second, you can always close as dupe if it's from the same user, to cover the case of problem users who post the same thing multiple times. Last but not least, this check is disabled on meta.

Here's an example duplicate post so you can see all the changes together: Is there a way to know proximity of getting banned?

Based on our queries, about 2% of questions didn't meet our new criteria when they were closed as dupe. Some of those are because they were closed as dupe of a dupe, which is something we shouldn't be doing anyway. Others are because the question actually has been asked before, but nobody has answered it yet. I think we can live with that, because maybe this is the one that will finally have the information / keywords / whatever it needs to get answered.

The fundamental goal of dupes is to help people find the right answer by getting all of the answers in one place. It is not to just clean up clutter. Dupes are okay. We love (some) dupes. There are many ways to ask the same question, and a user might not be able to find the answer if they're asking it a different way. We think these changes maintain the goal of dupes and result in a much better experience for the asker and the Googler who just want to find an answer.

With that said, this is still experimental -- if it's breaking the site we can always remove the requirement for an answer. Now that this is live, we're especially interested in examples of things you'd like to close as dupe but can't now.

Part of the close reason rework project:

1. Changes to "close as duplicate" (part deux)
2. Help us make "Off-Topic" close reasons clearer to the OP
3. Help us make "Not Constructive" and "Not a Real Question" closures more effective
4. Every "close" has its thorn: replace "close" with "on hold" for the first five days

Answer 1

We've changed the instructions everywhere to indicate that the answers to the original question must solve the dupe’s problem. That means that the original must have an answer ^†

I don't agree at all with this new requirement. Just re-asking a question because it has no answers is bad practice. This is what the bounty system was created for. If you have further information that clarifies the problem, you can comment and/or edit the question.

Furthermore, if one of the X questions that cover more or less the same ground wind up getting answered, the other X - 1 will just remain unanswered. Before the change, all question but one could get closed, and you'd only have to monitor one of them to keep looking for an answer.

^† There are some exceptions to the requirement that the original have answers. First, mods can close as dupe of anything, to handle any special cases. Second, you can always close as dupe if it's from the same user, to cover the case of problem users who post the same thing multiple times.

The second exception is a step into the right direction, but it still fails to address a rather common scenario: Cross-posts using unassociated accounts can result in two identical questions on the same SE site. These didn't use to require mod intervention. They do now.

Some of those are because they were closed as dupe of a dupe, which is something we shouldn't be doing anyway.

Why? Many questions that have been closed as duplicates of other question have answers. These answers might be more applicable to a specific case or just downright better than the answers to the "original" question. If that's the case, closing as a dupe of a dupe is what I've been doing, and I fail to see why that would be an issue.

Answer 2

Perhaps a better approach is to allow something to be marked as a dupe but not closed if the duplicate does not have an answer. If any of the dupes finally gets an answer, all the other dupes are at that point closed (assuming sufficient dupe votes etc) - in a sense, this answer was waiting for a well-asked, well-worded question to come along, and the first answer to it is a signal it was found.

This lets the issue of whether these are all duplicates or not still be hammered out in the existing way, but still lets new users (who remember cannot edit others' questions) add to the overall corpus on the matter in an attempt to be clear enough/interesting enough/lucky enough to find an answer. The "winning" question that lives on is the sole best way of asking.

Aside: Really glad to see closed behavior getting a hard look. I had been taking a break from StackOverflow because I was tiring of the pattern of - google something, find perfect question on SO, Closed, no reason given.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if this belongs here, but it was rather long for a comment so here it is.

This is what I see happening:

When it comes to bugs on Ask Ubuntu, Rachel asks why we don't just close them all as off-topic individually.

On Dennis' answer above Servy suggests that most (some at least?) unanswered duplicate questions should be closed as "Not a Real Question" and AndrewC agrees with him.

SO:

Since we (almost) all agree the majority of these questions deserve to be closed anyway, why was this change implemented?

I'd argue that closing (again most) of these unanswered duplicates as a duplicate is better than closing them as "Off-topic" or "Not a Real Question" and linking them with a comment. That just seems hackish and counter-intuitive according to the way the site was supposed to work and/or has worked in the past.