4 ms·

I think a big cause of SO's unpleasantness is the directive to eliminate duplicate questions. Judging whether two questions are duplicate has a lot of gray area

by blt 7y ago

I think a big cause of SO's unpleasantness is the directive to eliminate duplicate questions. Judging whether two questions are duplicate has a lot of gray area, and most people seem too eager to hit the button. It's frustrating when someone marks your question as duplicate based on their own flawed understanding of what you asked. What is the harm in having multiple similar questions on the site? As the passive reader, it's no big deal to look through two or three similar pages. A massive academic field, Information Retrieval, gives us many sophisticated tools to rank similar chunks of information by relevance. As the number of duplicates increases, all possible ways of asking the question will be covered. When someone new comes to ask the same question, they'll see at least one duplicate in the real time results for "possible duplicates" as they type. So I don't think we need to worry about hundreds of duplicates.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
The problem, as I see it, with duplicates is it leaves questions with poor answers when better answers already exist for the same question. For example I've recently been looking at a problem with /boot on the AskUbuntu SO site. There are multiple answers for the question of what to do when one has a lot of old kernels filling up your /boot (not the actual problem I had); one question is relatively well handled and has several "answers" including good answers (IMO). But other questions that aren't linked up to this particular one have some of the poorer answers, or lack the breadth of the canonical question page and so might lead people to do things that aren't optimal or leave them unable to boot their system. The problem with that is that often questions fall in to a looser grouping where the same answers apply, or very nearly to a group of questions but the questions aren't really identical. SO's current system is maybe a least worst approach? I'm not sure one can tell with out trying alternatives.
- blt 7y ago
  When duplicate is detected/flagged, let the author of the newer question know, and they can decide whether or not to delete it?

by blt 7y ago

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

The problem, as I see it, with duplicates is it leaves questions with poor answers when better answers already exist for the same question. For example I've recently been looking at a problem with /boot on the AskUbuntu SO site. There are multiple answers for the question of what to do when one has a lot of old kernels filling up your /boot (not the actual problem I had); one question is relatively well handled and has several "answers" including good answers (IMO). But other questions that aren't linked up to this particular one have some of the poorer answers, or lack the breadth of the canonical question page and so might lead people to do things that aren't optimal or leave them unable to boot their system. The problem with that is that often questions fall in to a looser grouping where the same answers apply, or very nearly to a group of questions but the questions aren't really identical. SO's current system is maybe a least worst approach? I'm not sure one can tell with out trying alternatives.

blt 7y ago
When duplicate is detected/flagged, let the author of the newer question know, and they can decide whether or not to delete it?