[GCU-Empiricist]

In my own experience ~7/10 times the duplicate question is something entirely different and I have to spend longer searching because of someone's ignorant pedantry.

[olavk]

Can you provide some examples of duplicates where the "duplicate" is actually something entirely different? Maybe I can help improve the situation.

[cpburns2009]

I asked a specific question about text wrapping in Java SWT a couple months ago. It was quickly closed by a Java gold badge holder as a duplicate of a question asking what the best Java GUI framework is... which had nothing to do with my question. Thankfully, few hours later another Java gold badge holder reopened it, and answered it.

[GCU-Empiricist]

I don't have a personal list but I'd suggest scraping r/programminghumor for stack overflow links would generate a statistically significant test set.

[olavk]

If it happens 7/10 for you it should be easy to find and link to some blatant examples. Since I have the rep to vote for reopen, we might be able to improve the world together.

[reitanqild]

For years it happened to me that more often than not when I found something really useful on stack overflow it was closed for some dumb reason.

IIRC this happened while other users seemed to be happily karma farming best-of questions.

I haven't seen so many lately but I've decided to start making bookmarks on them and here is one I found a few days ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13202705/what-are-the-us...

Myself I've witnessed first hand a question about networking being shot down on networking because it was between company networks instead of inside company networks.