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Many questions on stack overflow are duplicates. These are often closed, but what would be nicer is if the question could be declared a synonym of another (by users of sufficiently high rep, or by votes).

Why do this? Well one reason duplicates come up is that there's lots of different ways of phrasing the same basic question. This means that when I type in the title for my question and it suggests related ones, it may completely miss the identical question due to it being worded completely differently. Having the ability to link different questions could go some way to alleviating this problem, and linking the good answers to the previous incarnation of the question to the newly asked question, instead of having "answers" consisting of stuff like:

Dupe: http://stackov...7456

P.S. This may well have been asked before, but I've checked all the suggested Related Questions and it doesn't look like it!

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Closing as a duplicate already does this.

If you see an answer that solely points out a duplicate question, kindly comment that such answers should be comments instead. Users, especially new users, won't all be used to our conventions and may be confused. We have to guide them.

Even if a question isn't determined to be a duplicate (e.g. reopened), posting comments on the question indicating closely related questions is still valuable.

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  • a new user can't post a comment
    – Ian Ringrose
    Commented Oct 17, 2010 at 17:00
  • @Ian: I know that it takes 50 rep. They'll get that quickly, and I wouldn't downvote them (or others, generally) for posting an answer instead. I'd still comment to let them know what the convention is.
    – Gnome
    Commented Oct 17, 2010 at 17:06
  • @Ian: Oh, by "especially new users" in my answer, I meant anyone with less than 1-2k.
    – Gnome
    Commented Oct 17, 2010 at 17:34

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