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SO has a "merge questions" feature, but it's rarely used. It is only available to elected moderators, and it's quite dangerous because it's not reversible witho

SO has a "merge questions" feature, but it's rarely used. It is only available to elected moderators, and it's quite dangerous because it's not reversible without assistance from SE staff. One major problem is that merging two very similar questions that are about the same concept would still end up with answers that seem out of place because they address a slightly different version of the question. Most cases should be solved by closing as duplicate, as that will create a link to the canonical answer. Anonymous users will also be automatically redirected to the canonical answer if there are no answers present on the duplicate.

manigandham 8y ago
That never seems to work well in practice. Most of the time, there are existing answers and "closing as duplicate" leaves up all of them as a separate question thread that just confuses everyone. The links between them and the duplicate message are not intuitive and easily overlooked, leading to an expectation of unfinished answers. Quora meanwhile has completely reversibility, and allows the community to do it. It's caused some problems but overall has cleaned up many common and repetitive questions.