| > The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not. The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question. By policy, whether a question is a duplicate depends on whether answers at the target answer the question that is actually present in the "question" post. The details required to adapt that Q&A to the originally motivating situation are irrelevant. In fact, there doesn't need to be an originally motivating situation in order to ask a valid question. In fact, you don't actually need to know an answer in order to ask a valid question. It is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to ask a question you know how to answer already, and provide the answer. (But both question and answer must meet standards, which are independent of who is asking and who is answering.) > Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. This fundamentally can't be measured. Especially not when the claim of "bad duplicate" usually comes from people who are demonstrably not interested in what the policy is. |
The point stands either way, reread my comment. When you ask a question on SO and somebody posts a regular answer, you the asker decide whether they've answered your question/solved your problem/Xed your Y/whatever else. Until you accept it as correct, SO assumes the posted answer did not X your Y.
In contrast when random people flag your question as a dupe, they the random people decide that the other question Xes your Y. If they misread your question, tough luck, SO assumes they are correct even though you're the only one who actually knows. That's the point I was making.
> This fundamentally can't be measured.
Again, reread my comments. If SO let other people suggest that an existing question Xes your Y, and gave you a button to accept their suggestion, then SO would know roughly how often dupe flags are correct.