As a Stack user, I'm often confronted to duplicates. In one of my other post, talking about duplicates, I came up with something that could be useful and would like to have your opinion on this.
Sometimes, duplicates questions comes with a very different way to ask the question (complete different wording), but when you know a bit about the subject, you can often trace an older question with answer an mark it as duplicate. The question will then be closed, then erased(? not completely sure about this last fact or how does that work). The user who asked the question will see the link of the duplicate and probably be able to find an answer to his question.
I see principally two problems to this :
- Sometimes, different good answers, that could apply to different, but similar, contexts are proposed on the questions and are then spread on both. If you plainly merge the question, only one title will subsists. If you don't the info will be kept spread.
- If the question is finally deleted, then another new user using similar wording won't be able to find the original question due to a lack of knowledge on the subject. That makes the information harder to find.
What about system that would allow to "tag" or "add" more than one title to some questions. Sure it would have to be approved and everything but would make the research easier on some frequently asked question. The title seen would still be the original, but there would be some kind of what ever way to see other title and to tag more titles. That could be a function directly related to closing duplicates (like an option or whatever).
Related to point 1. Also, there's a link from the duplicated question to the original one but not from the original one to the dupe so someone falling on the original one might lack info that is on the dupe that could have helped him resolve his problem.
Also If there is a duplicate of that question, well then this is the best example of the problem the feature is pointing to as I have not found any dupe while I was searching, probably for wording differently!
