It has been widely discussed and seems to be generally agreed that where two story-identification questions have an accepted answer that is the same, one should be closed as duplicate of the other.
What seems more contentious is closing questions where only one has an accepted answer and where the other appears to be a duplicate.
What should we do in those circumstances?
story-identification questions should only be closed as duplicates where both answers are accepted, regardless of the similarity between them. (If the OP posts a "yes this is it" comment, that's as good as an acceptance.)
Simple, easy to administer.
If only one question has a known correct answer, then we should leave the other open.
My response to the suggestion that we close ‘obvious’ story ID dupes has always boiled down to “Okay, but why?”. We have a slightly tidier site, but that seems to be about it. By contrast, there are several reasons not to do it:
If we’re wrong, we’ve just annoyed the OP.
And what have we gained by doing so? The site is slightly tidier, but they don’t have the answer. So we have a frustrated user (who I think is likely to just leave, and not correct us), and bad information on the site.
Even if we’re correct, we’re essentially accepting an answer for the OP.
By asserting that the answer is “obvious” and closing as dupe, we’ve cut the OP out of the process.
There have been many proposals for a mechanism that allows us to accept an answer on somebody else’s behalf, and they’ve always met strong opposition. I don’t see why story identification questions should get special treatment.
At best, we should try to guess what the story is – but only the OP can confirm. We shouldn’t take that control out of their hands.
There are other ways I think we cause harm if we close questions as incorrect dupes, but I don’t have time to write those up at the moment. Suffice to say, I disagree with the idea of closing dupes without OP confirmation.
I'll post my answer in the form of a question: I have to question what makes a story ID question a duplicate? Is it the answer? I ask because the name of a book could be the answer to several different questions. Just because the answer is the same doesn't mean the questions were. It's a slippery slope.
The second question should be closed as a duplicate.
With the following caveats;
It should only be closed if it's judged by the community, or by a gold tag badge holder in that category to be clearly a duplicate of the other (e.g. where the similarity is distinct and obvious).
A moderator should be immediately flagged to re-open the question if the OP indicates (in comments or in chat) that it's not a duplicate.
Example:
Short story about people who lived only a few days
Closed as a dupe of:
Looking for story where time is accelerated and characters have to get back to ship?
