Today, I was reviewing new posts and came to a post titled as "Why does Ubuntu not ship with a way to fill in PDF forms?" which I found a low quality question and down-voted it. Surprisingly I got a notice that my review was a bad one since the question was a good quality question!

Screenshot of the question and the notice!

This question has problem in at least two aspects:

  1. It is not a question. It is claiming there is no way to do so instead of asking how to do.

  2. It is not a good question since it is a duplicate of several other questions such as this and this so on.

It seems there is something wrong with the review validation system!
Am I wrong?
What should I do when I find a post as a duplicate post? Shouldn't I down-vote and flag it as duplicate?

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    1 The question does not ask how, it asks why, it is not claiming anything, it asks why it is like this. 2 Both your duplicates answer the how but the OP never asked how, they asked why, so they are not duplicates. – Mark Kirby Feb 18 '17 at 11:27
  • Hmmm. That sounds logical. Should I delete my question here? – Mostafa Ahangarha Feb 18 '17 at 11:35
  • Thats just my observation on it, you should wait for others too. – Mark Kirby Feb 18 '17 at 11:37
  • I think you are right since the answer which is accepted also refers to 'why' and not 'how'. So I think I was wrong in interpreting the intention of the question. – Mostafa Ahangarha Feb 18 '17 at 11:45

First of all, no, you should not downvote duplicates just because they are duplicates! Duplicates are useful because they help direct users to the right answer. The search functionality of the site is, um, well, less than perfect. It is not easy for experienced users to find dupes, let alone new ones. So no, please don't downvote dupes just because they're dupes1.

That said, yes, the review system is flawed. Remember that this is automatic, it simply selects upvoted questions and considers them "good". Sometimes, sadly, we have bad questions (although I don't think this is an example of one, it seems perfectly OK to me) that are nevertheless upvoted and sometimes those make them into the review tests and make people fail the test for selecting the right action. Don't worry about it. Unless you fail a lot of tests, nobody cares. And even if you do fail a lot, that will just ban you from review for a little time. After that's over, you can come back and review again.

1OK, there are some cases where the duplicate is so easy to find that it shows the OP clearly put no effort into the question. You can downvote for the lack of effort, just not only because it is a dupe please.

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  • Very comprehensive and useful answer. Thanks – Mostafa Ahangarha Feb 18 '17 at 11:59
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    @MostafaAhangarha - And even high-rep users fail audits occasionally :) – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Feb 19 '17 at 19:59

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