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Recently, there've been a number of answers to accepted story-identification questions with possible matches to the question. In this case, it's one new user who's doing this to a bunch of questions, and not providing corroborating details, but when they started getting flagged for deletion because they "couldn't be the right answer" since one was already accepted, I commented on it, saying that partial and late answers are perfectly fine since our goal is as much to answer future querents as it is to answer that person, and allowing these late "incorrect" answers will help us when the next person searching for a book that matches the question can see other matching answers that might answer their search.

Ultimately, this might just be a matter of changing the reasoning deletion from "you shouldn't provide an answer if there's already an accepted one that's different" to "you should provide sufficient detail to answer the question", but maybe I misremember our policy for answers and our tolerance for incorrect matching answers that can't be the correct answer for the current question.

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    I've closed this as a duplicate since we have question(s) from years ago asking the same thing, which you didn't mention here. If you're aware of those previous questions and you want to reopen the discussion in 2021, or if you're asking something subtly different here, then let me know and I can reopen it again.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Jan 2, 2021 at 18:55
  • No worries. I thought we'd covered this before, but I couldn't find it. It looks like scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/245/… might be an earlier version.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Jan 2, 2021 at 22:02
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    Actually I was wondering if we should close the oldest version as a dupe of the one from 2016, since the answer to the 2016 one seems to better reflect our actual practice than the answer to the 2011 one.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Jan 2, 2021 at 22:14

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