Duplicate policy and intensive workload due to it

Question

Firstly, I have read the arguments here.

I have asked this question: Are there any specific examples in Lord of the Rings that are influenced by the WWII? and it was marked as duplicate and I was directed to the answer of How much did Tolkien write about the connection between WWI and his work?.

It is very obvious that my question asks for influences from WWII in LotR, while the question that supposedly holds the answer to my question asks the influences from WWI. Examining the given answer, the available information about WWII was

• And while World War I was "his war"' so to speak, and had a far more personal impact on his thinking, he wrote Lord of the Rings during the dark days of World War II. His son fought in the war, and it would have been impossible for any Brit living at the time to avoid being seriously affected by the conflict, especially with German bombers flying overhead. So he clearly inserted elements of his own wartime service, and the general experience of WWII, into his writing.

• National Geographic - INFLUENCES ON THE LORD OF THE RINGS World War I and World War II http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences.html

The given link only states that

"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience," Tolkien acknowledged, but he strongly denied that his story was an allegory for World War I or II.*"

As a result, the linked answer carries traces of information which can be incorporated to an answer to my question without proper sourcing.

Moreover, without answering this question, two helpful users offered extra information that was not presented in the linked answer in comments. @ibid suggested me to look at the actual foreword, and @wcullen suggested me this page. Although the second link is definitely not canon, actual foreword is. Again, the foreword is used in the linked answer, however it was quoted once at an unrelated excerpt.

My first question is, if you were to ask the influences of WWII on LotR before the question on influences of WWI on LotR, would you be satisfied with this content?

Before asking this question, I went through questions asked in the last three months of meta. A good deal of questions in the meta are about questions that were marked as duplicate. For some questions, there is obviously not a consensus whether it is duplicate or not.

The current duplicate policy suggests the marking of different questions with the same answer as duplicate. This interpretation is definitely subjective and requires intense workload of the close-voters. If the close-voter do not examine the dupe-target in detail, they may erroneously vote close.

Furthermore, if an event A has three implicit and not obvious causes X, Y, Z, questions asking "What did X lead to?" and "What did Y lead to?" should be marked as duplicate. Similarly, if an event B leads to three implicit and not obvious results P, Q, R, "Why did P happen?" and "Why did Q happen?" are duplicate as well. This marking process prevents users who might wish to offer detailed insight on the other questions from doing so.

I have been here active for some time here. My questions has been marked duplicate, off-topic and primarily opinion based before, and they kind of were. However, I did not notice the extent of duplicate rule simply because it was not enforced. Some question that might have been marked duplicate are:

1, 2 and 3

4, 5 and 15

6 and 7

8, 9 and 11

10, 12, 13 and 14

For the sake of my time, I stop searching for possible duplicates. However, the subjectivity of duplication rules sometimes work against the community and prevent better and/or more related answers to the duplicates due to sharing a portion of the answer.

So, why do we keep a system that we know is subjective and open to errors? Why should having questions of similar but definitely different nature be avoided simply because they have similar answers?

EDIT: Checking the meta SE, we can see that

There's only one problem with your feature request: answers don't make questions duplicates. Questions are duplicates only when the questions themselves are duplicates. In other words, you can't close a question as a duplicate of another question just because "you can find your answer over here."

So, claiming a question is duplicate because of an extended answer given to a related but different question does not make it duplicate. This practice is against the general SE principles.

Answer 1

On our general policy

This site's current (most recent) policy on duplication, and specifically on whether or not answers can make questions duplicates, may be found here (emphasis mine):

To avoid looking silly then, I would strongly recommend using answers as more of a litmus test than as a policy: if you're already pretty sure the questions are duplicates, testing the answers of one against the other can easily confirm your suspicions. But don't close completely irrelevant questions as duplicates of one another simply because there's an animated gif that happens to apply to both...

In other words, duplication is mostly about questions, with answers being only a secondary concern. Conversely, questions can be duplicates (asking the same thing) even if neither of them has a good answer.

Thinking about the purpose of the policy, rather than just blindly applying the rules ...

• It makes sense on some level to close question A as a duplicate of related question B if the latter has answers which satisfactorily address question A. The duplicate banner, after all, does say "This question already has an answer here".
• Duplication is also valid when the answers to B don't address A but the questions are identical - this means that a good answer to B (even if there are none yet) would address A, so answering A itself would be redundant.
• Duplication doesn't make sense if the questions are different and it's unreasonable to expect any good answer to B to fully address A as well, even if the answers to B may tangentially address A in passing. (I believe this is the situation being alluded to by the "animated gif" reference.)

On your concerns about "intensive workload"

There are enough users with the 3k reputation required to vote to close - 405 at the time of writing, of whom at least a couple of hundred must be still active on the site - that I don't think "intensive workload" is an issue. If you feel that a question should (or shouldn't) be a duplicate, you can vote to close (or reopen) it yourself, which will send it into the review queues to be voted on by the community.

Also, consistency is a worthy goal but often an unattainable one. It would be great to have a clear enough duplicate policy that you could never point to two differently-treated questions and say "this one was closed, so that one should have been too!" But in reality, this will probably never happen. We should try to be consistent, but not get too dismayed if we aren't perfectly consistent.

I haven't read all the 14 questions you linked to as possible duplicates. Perhaps some of them should indeed be closed. Perhaps they will be as a result of this meta post. I trust in the community to review and vote on them as needed.

On your specific question

The older question asks specifically about WWI, and the answers mostly address that, with the occasional remark which is either related to WWII or is more general and could apply to either.

• Is your question satisfactorily answered by these remarks in the answers to the older question? Nope. As you note, much has been written about connections between Tolkien's writing and WWII, and very little of it is included in those answers.
• Is it reasonable to request answers to the older question including detailed analysis of yours? Not really. The standard response when the OP of a duplicate question says the answers to the older question aren't good enough is "well, wait for a better answer or set a bounty then". But in this case, setting a bounty on a question about WWI connections which would only be awarded to an answer containing detailed discussion of WWII connections seems like a pretty strange thing to do. "If you want answers about WWII, why not ask a separate question about WWII rather than trying to hijack this one about WWI?", I'd ask.

Also, at the time of writing, your question has 3 votes to reopen. It's not as if nobody agrees with you that it's not a duplicate.