Does this Meta policy overrule our Meta?

Question

This answer references this Meta:SE post, claiming that that Stack Exchange policy is to close questions only if the questions themselves are duplicates, not if an answer to one question contains an answer to another.

On the other hand, users on this site frequently close questions that are very different, and indeed whose actual answers are very different, because one happens to answer the other.

1. Does the previously mentioned question really constitute a Meta:SE policy indicating that marking questions as duplicates based on answers is discouraged?
2. If so, does it overrule our (apparent) policy, or is the community free to adopt a different policy?

Answer 1

I'd reckon the closest thing we have to an official, network-wide policy on duplicates is found in the 2010 blog post, "Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication":

Here are my official guidelines on question duplication:

1. Having one "perfect" form of a question that contains every possible answer to every slight variation of that question is a myth at best and actively harmful at worst.

2. Having dozens and dozens of variations of the same question is clearly bad.

3. What we want is on the order of 4 or 5 similar-but-not-quite-the-same duplicates to cover all possible search terms and common permutations of the question. It is also OK for these duplicates to have their own answers so people who find them don't have to click yet again to get to a good answer.

The idea of a massive canonical Topic FAQ is persistently alluring; instead of having 50 questions about a "sorting hat", you could just have one question with a few dozen huge answers! However, this quickly becomes impractical:

• Massively broad questions don't rank as well in search results as specific, focused questions.
• Folks with specific, focused questions tend to not read massively broad FAQs even if they do find them.
• Finding specific information among multiple answers to massively broad FAQs is troublesome.
• Remembering which information is even contained in these tomes is difficult; eventually, folks just start to assume that they contain everything and close new questions without worrying whether they're actually answered or not... This chokes out new information.

What does this have to do with your question? Well, normally the presence of identical answers is a pretty good indication that the questions themselves are the same (unless the answer itself is something trivial like the name of a character). But this doesn't hold if a question has managed to attract a lot of different answers - so you end up in situations like this where various answers might be applied to completely different questions even though most of the answers are inapplicable. Frankly, this is a wee bit silly, and smells more of folks being bored with the topic than anything else.

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...

Answer 2

1. Does the previously mentioned question really constitute a Meta:SE policy...

No, that single question doesn't constitute meta.SE policy. I think this answer from meta>SE is what most people have in mind when they say that duplicate answers can make a question a duplicate:

How should duplicate questions be handled?

As that answer says:

Questions may be duplicates if they have the same (potential) answers. This includes not only word-for-word duplicates, but also the same idea expressed in different words.

Answer 3

Narrow issue

The reason why that particular question is overruled by wider SE meta discussions is because even if we (on SFF:SE) decided that we wanted to be able to link answers as duplicates rather than questions, a decision has already been taken on a site-wide basis not to allow that.

Since it would require a programming change and not just a policy change, this means that all the wishing in the world ain't gonna make it happen.

Obviously the flipside is that if we do decide (for some reason) to accept this as site-wide policy on the say-so of a single poorly upvoted answer by someone who's not a member of SE staff, then we'd suddenly have to reopen potentially thousands of closed questions.

Wider issue

Individual sites are allowed to make their own policy through a process of concensus and opinion. It is a long-standing and reasonably popular policy on SFF:SE (and site-wide) that where an existing answer covers a newer question, the new question is marked as a duplicate in order to prevent multiple semi-identical answers being repeatedly posted, either by the original author (wasting their time) or by a new author (leading to accusations of plagiarism).

We're probably a little more aggressive about de-duping on the basis of answers, but that's largely because we have such as well informed core of users that dupe questions are picked up more easily, even when they're less obvious (at first glance) to less experienced users.