Give askers a way to challenge a duplicate closure

Question

When I read about Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in various other places on the internet, a lot of it are complaints about the moderation. There is one specific complaint I see a lot, and that is that questions are wrongly closed as duplicates.

Getting their question closed as a duplicate should actually make users happy, it is in many cases an even better response than an direct answer. A proper closure as an exact duplicate means there is already a hopefully excellent answer to their question, and we just told them where to find it. And a frequent duplicate target is likely to be a much better answer than something a user wrote quickly just for the new question.

But it does seem that users are often not happy to have their questions closed as a duplicate. While I suspect that the extent of complaints I've seen about this exaggerates the problem, I have seen a fair share of overzealous and careless duplicate closures, that aren't actually exact duplicates.

There is a way to get your question reopened, by editing it and putting it into the reopen queue. But that is not obvious or transparent to new users in any way.

What I propose is to show the asker a dialog similar to the existing one shown for questions with duplicate close votes that are still open, where the user can short-circuit the voting and close the question immediately. The user would have two options in this case for their closed question:

• Great, the duplicate answers my question. Thanks!
• The duplicate does not answer my question, my question is actually different, please reopen it.

If the user clicks on the option challenging the closure, it probably makes sense to also require them to edit it at that point and clarify how it is different from the duplicate. And then the question would be put into the reopen queue.

I've no idea how often this would be misused for proper duplicate closures. But then, this feature would also provide us with statistics about how many of these closures are perceived as wrong by the askers, and what the community thinks about those and whether they are reopened.

Answer 1

Update: As of May 2018, the bug below has been fixed. This is a huge step in the right direction, but still very subtle.

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This kind of already exists in the current UI, though it currently suffers from a bug. When looking at many duplicate questions, you see this notice:

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

This notice is actually not shown to the author, just to others browsing the question. The asker sees a slightly modified version of that notice:

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question.

Well, this notice is still fairly subtle and doesn't really address your request. But that's not the main issue here.

This, unfortunately, suffers from a bug. If the closed duplicate question has no answers, or no upvoted or accepted answer, it shows the following notice instead to everyone (both the author and other users):

This question was marked as an exact duplicate of an existing question.

That notice is actually supposed to check the target question instead, not the closed duplicate. In other words, it is supposed to coincide with the alternate header for the target links "This question is an exact duplicate of" instead of "This question already has an answer here", which thankfully is implemented correctly. That notice should thus be very rare, and only be shown in procedural cases, because on non-meta sites closing questions as duplicates of unanswered questions is restricted.

Initially, I thought this bug was rather minor. But, as you pointed out, this is indeed a very important bug, because many of these closures are on questions with no answers, on which users are shown quite a stern warning instead of a gentle prompt to edit. While not really addressing the issue that much (since the link is still quite subtle), fixing this bug will be a big step in the right direction.

Answer 2

• Great, the duplicate answers my question. Thanks!

That's already implemented more or less

• The duplicate does not answer my question, my question is actually different, please reopen it.

This would reduce introducing the necessary efforts in the editing needed to ask for reopening a question and cannot really be automated that way.

Just saying

my question is actually different, please reopen it

is merely meaningless and useless after a duplicate closure.

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An appropriate way I could think of, is if they'll choose the second option (slightly adapted):

• The duplicate does not answer my question, my question is actually different, I want to edit it to explain why.

and the editor window pops up to show the question + a pre-made section added (similar as for the custom close reasons):

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There's no appropriate answer for my question found at the marked duplicate 
question and answer(s).  
My question is different, because <enter your reasons here>