Reopening a duplicate so you can add an answer, then reclosing it?

Question

This question was asked yesterday: Very old novel about a planet with a living ocean

A comment was posted asking whether the answer was "Solaris". OP replied to say that it was, so I closed the question as a duplicate, in line with our policy on dupes (e.g. where OP accepts in a comment that it's a dupe, it can be closed as a dupe regardless of whether it's been answered)

I was quite surprised to see that it now has an accepted answer. When I checked the timeline I found that a user, the same commenter from earlier had used their gold tag badge authority to reopen the question, post an answer, then reclose it a few seconds later.

Was this an appropriate course of action, and more generally, should we be reopening closed duplicate questions to answer them?

Answer 1

The question's timeline shows that it was re-opened on 2023-11-04 at 23:14:10Z, answered at 23:15:25Z, and re-closed with the same duplicate target at 23:18:17Z by the same user -- a span of just over 4 minutes. No other events are recorded on the timeline between the re-opening and closing. It may be permissible in rare cases for a user to do this (e.g., if the user is only made aware of new information that convinces him the question should be closed after he has re-opened it and posted an answer, or to change the close reason), but this is not one of them. No new information was made available between the re-opening and closing, so this user clearly knew the question should be closed at the time of re-opening.

The purpose of the re-open privilege is to re-open questions that should not be closed; the act of re-opening a question that one knows should be closed is contrary to the purpose of the re-open privilege so it is an abuse of that privilege. In this case, the user who abused this privilege had earned a gold badge in story-identification and was therefore entrusted by the system to unilaterally re-open and close such a question for the duplicate close reason -- this is a further abuse of the re-open privilege and the trust given to this user. The user also benefitted from this abuse of the re-open privilege and trust by posting an answer in order to gain reputation¹ from upvotes and answer acceptance, which further compounds the abuse of the re-open privilege.

It has been argued that the help center does not explicitly say users are not permitted to re-open a question just to answer it and close it. This is because the help center is not designed to explicitly state every obvious fact about the network. Nonetheless, there are several not-so-subtle clues that this behavior is not permitted. For example:

1. The help center article on the reopen review queue instructs users to "evaluate the question as it is now" and "leave [it] closed if any close reason(s) still apply". Since the question did not change nor was the re-opening user made aware of any new information, the correct choice is clearly to leave it closed. The same instructions apply both within and outside of the actual review queue -- another fact that is not explicitly stated but obvious.
2. The system does not allow new answers to be posted on closed questions. The fact that the user needed to circumvent the system's rules is an unmistakable sign that such a question should not be re-opened simply to answer it and re-close it.

It has also been argued that duplicate questions may somehow benefit from posting duplicate answer(s) on them. That may be the reader's personal opinion, but it is not the well-established philosophy of the Stack Exchange system -- which is that duplicate questions should be closed and linked to the original question so that, ideally, all answers are posted on one, canonical question. This avoids the need to post duplicate answers and reduces the likelihood that users will need to browse to all the duplicate questions in search for a sufficiently good answer.

The duplicate answer posted in abuse of the re-open privilege is not obviously better than the answer to the original question, and contravenes the Stack Exchange philosophy on duplicate questions. Therefore, I have deleted it. The user is free to post an answer with any additional details on the original question.

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¹In the form of useless Stack Exchange Internet points, but likely not in the usual sense of the word.

Answer 2

Unilaterally reopening a question to answer it and then unilaterally closing it again is not an appropriate use of one's unilateral closing and reopening privileges.

The privilege is not meant to give one a free pass to answer questions that should stay closed. This applies to both moderators and gold tag badge holders. A question should stay closed if it’s a duplicate, or stay open if it's not.

In this case, the question is a duplicate and already has an answer in the duplicate target, so it was inappropriate and unnecessary to reopen it, answer it, and then re-close it.

Answer 3

There is an issue with story ID questions that has caused some argument in the past and that has, as far as I know, never been definitively addressed.

After a decade of story ID questions all the well known works have been asked about - many times for the most popular stories. So if someone asks a question about e.g. a well know Asimov short story it's going to be a duplicate and all the more experienced members of the site will know it's a duplicate. That means writing an answer is a deliberate choice to write an answer to a question known to be a duplicate.

The question is whether we should post an answer anyway? In a way that I cannot frame in any logical way this feels like rep-hunting behavior and particularly deplorable when done by experienced users who don't need to scrabble for reputation. But then I have posted answers to questions that I should have known were duplicates so I have no moral high ground to stand on. My experience is that there is a burst of excitement on realising that I recognise a story (without recourse to Google) and this often leads me to post first and think second.

And in any case, who says it's wrong to post an answer to a question you know is a duplicate? The OP didn't know it was a duplicate, and it's probably annoying to have your question closed without an answer when it was asked in good faith. And there will be special cases such as when the OP has remembered an obscure aspect of the story that is not mentioned in any of the answers to the duplicate(s).

So I suspect there is no answer. The sensible course is to point that rep is an irrelevant measure of anything and the subjective feelings referred to in my third paragraph are irrational and probably a bit childish. But story identification inevitably becomes competitive and it's only human to regard your rep as a mark of your status in the community as an uber-nerd.

Having said all this, the reason we close a question is because we believe that it should not be answered. I'm not sure if the SE guidelines on closed questions explicitly say they should not be answered but it seems to me that this is implied. You may feel that a question should not have been closed, so you may wish to reopen it, post an answer, then leave it open. But to reopen it, post an answer, then close it again does seems like a step too far.

Answer 4

Well, this action had been at the suggestion of the OP of the question (that is, myself) who in a comment (that I have erased afterwards) wrote that I found it unfair for the user who had found the book in a comment rather than as a proper answer. I was checking the question for the case where it were reopened and was very happy to accept (and in addition upvote) the answer. In fact I felt guilty: since the title sounded familiar I checked on Wikipedia and from the summary there I recognised it was correct. I did not realise before that just telling in a comment that it was right made it instantly a dupe. Next time this happens I'll write a comment "This sounds familiar, please write a formal answer adding some details so I can be sure and accept it if it is indeed correct." My bad, apologies.

Answer 5

I have a mixed opinion. In cases where the duplicate answer is sufficient, I think it's alright to leave it as a comment, particularly if the alternative is copying and pasting the other answer verbatim. If it is not equivalent (they're asking about different parts of the work, or remember different details, I think it's appropriate to have an original answer posted. And overall, I'm mildly opposed to a comment-only answer, since comments are not guaranteed to be permanent, and mildly opposed to there just being a link to another answer, since the content at links can change, and we have a general policy against link-only answers, that they should stand on their own.

I attach no moral judgment to opening the question, answering it, and closing it. To me, that's more of a personal choice than a moral one. I suppose that, as one of the top three, I might be a bit biased, but past the first few thousand points (where you accumulate privileges), the point system really doesn't mean all that much. I think that I personally would not re-open a question to post an answer based on a comment accepted by another comment, but I might be inclined to if it were not accepted since, again, comments are ephemeral, and answers should stand on their own.