Why are questions considered duplicates although they ask different things?

Question

I'm all for closing redundant questions as dupes, and we do seem to have series of questions asking similar things, but observe question number one:

I am not interested in the movies, just the TV series. However, since the show has many seasons, I am not interested in watching the show start to finish

^{(emphasis mine)}

And here comes the apparent "duplicate":

I want to watch every movie and TV-series there is about Star Trek [..]

^{(emphasis mine)}

The OP of the second one even points out:

In This question the person only wanted to watch the TV series.

Given that six to seven films are set in the TOS era and cannot be fully understood or appreciated without having watched the series (which is reflected in the accepted answer to the first question, suggesting to skip TOS altogether and start with TNG) these questions do not seem like duplicates to me. Maybe some of the VTCers can explain this to me?

Answer 1

If there is a policy that questions are duplicates if there is an existing answer to a different question that answers them, then I think this policy is incorrect. If there is an answer to a question which answers a different question, then I am inclined to mark that answer down. Clearly a question and answer site is at its most useful if people can find answers to their questions as they arise. Insisting that they then work their way through questions that don't answer* the question that they are interested in in order to find bits of the answer to the question they are actually interested in is inefficient and unhelpful.

*This was previously "relate to" rather than "answer" - edited for clarity, but noted to preserve the sense of the comments below.

Answer 2

I think basing the decision of closing a question on the answers is plainly wrong. Here's a good summary on StackOverflow Meta of a similar problem.

When I ask a question which is different from existing ones, how am I supposed to know that the answer would turn out to be the same? You can't judge the question based on the answers because the answers don't exist when the question is asked.

Worse, I may not even be able to find the other question which contains an answer that would answer my question. The other question is worded differently, and I obviously can't look for the existing answer because I don't know what that answer would be.

Such a policy only creates problems.

Answer 3

As DVK mentioned in a comment, one of the primary factors in determining if questions are duplicates is if the answer (or answers) to one address the other.

In this case, this answer and this answer to the original question both explicitly mention the movies in addition to the series.

Thus, the original question fully covers the duplicate question, even though the original question didn't ask for information on the movies.