The big issue here is that you're identifying duplicate questions (which is helpful!) but don't have the reputation yet to mark them as duplicates. So you have

The big issue here is that you're identifying duplicate questions (which is helpful!) but don't have the reputation yet to mark them as duplicates. So you have answers that are essentially calling them out as duplicates, but won't help them get marked as such. That's... A hard problem. On the one hand, it'd be nice if we could just lower the reputation needed to flag things as duplicates... on the other, there's a real risk of abuse there if folks who aren't yet familiar with how things work go around flagging things and annoying askers: there are a lot of new questions that are similar to existing questions, but have subtle differences that a cursory examination may not pick up. An idea that's been tossed around for a few years is to enable folks to essentially post "this is a duplicate" answers that do nothing but link and summarize another answer... If they get upvoted / accepted, the question is a duplicate; if they get downvoted, it's not. There are some potential pitfalls there too, of course. In the meantime, my best advice would be to summarize the answers you're linking to, and spend at least a sentence or two explaining how they relate to the question you're answering... Then include a link as your source. Not only does this avoid problems when the question isn't a duplicate, it doesn't make it look like you're just trying to ride the coattails of someone else (which tends to inspire negative reactions in people even when the answer is helpful). More advice here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing