Currently Stack Overflow users penalise duplicated questions (by voting them down), which I guess is fair. However this often leads users to delete their duplicated questions and in effect also delete the answers of other users' hard work. Some of those answers might be valuable.

I personally often find duplicate questions useful. They can lead me to original questions and answers I look for since they are linked as "duplicate" to those questions.

In other words the duplicate questions have value and I would argue that deleting them should not be encouraged.

Edit: I made this suggestion on a (false) premise that the question with the upvoted answers can be deleted. I can see now this is wrong as in fact I cannot delete this question. Therefore my entire argument is invalid. Thanks for clearing it up.

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    It already has this possibility, flag a moderator if one of the answers is so good that it deserves merging. This is pretty rare though. – BradleyDotNET Sep 9 '15 at 0:59
  • @BradleyDotNET Ok, so not a problem that needs a button/feature or the case that users don't know about this possibility? I certainly didn't know. Related - are there any statistics on how many questions are being deleted that contain any answers in them? – Datageek Sep 9 '15 at 1:01
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    IMO its such a rare thing that I don't see where increased visibility would help (let alone where to put it). As far as the query goes, someone ought to be able to run a SEDE query on it, only problem is that it doesn't contain deleted questions IIRC. Perhaps a mod can help. – BradleyDotNET Sep 9 '15 at 1:04
  • I think this question addresses your question: Do not delete good duplicates! – icktoofay Sep 9 '15 at 1:15
  • @icktoofay Thanks, also this meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230/…. I am proposing a solution here. – Datageek Sep 9 '15 at 1:23
  • Could you make your proposed solution more explicit, then? I see you have suggested a few different things, but the title, among other things, makes it not-so-clear that you’re actually proposing something rather than just asking about current policy. – icktoofay Sep 9 '15 at 1:26
  • @icktoofay - edited to a single proposal, cheers – Datageek Sep 9 '15 at 1:30

I don't think the proposed changes to voting rules for duplicates are a good idea.

You're arguing that people tend to downvote duplicates, which you say is bad because it leads the OP to delete the question, destroying a signpost as well as any answers (this second point is not too risky in my opinion because the OP can't delete their question if it has an upvoted answer, an accepted answer, or multiple answers). Your proposed solution is to block negative scores on duplicates or get rid of the score entirely.

First, I think this proposal would be harmful because there genuinely are low-quality dupes that should be removed from the site. A poorly worded question that has already been asked 10 times in various different ways is not going to make a very nice signpost for future visitors; it's better off being deleted. By downvoting and quickly closing these questions, the community is helping move the question toward this fate instead of keeping a broken window around in perpetuity. By blocking downvotes, your proposals would make it harder to get rid of duplicates we don't want to keep around. Note that previous discussions of the importance of keeping around duplicates has focused on preserving good duplicates (questions with good wording that have attracted great answers), not low-quality ones.

Further, the community does not blindly downvote all duplicates; instead, duplicates that users find useful are often upvoted, and sometimes quite significantly:

In summary, the community uses both upvotes and downvotes to differentiate between duplicates that are useful and those that are not; we shouldn't take away one of those tools.

  • Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware there are restrictions for deleting the questions. It's all clear now - I agree that existing system is good as it is. – Datageek Sep 9 '15 at 13:55

I don't think anything needs to be done here. the votes on the question are independent of the answer. If there's a really good answer, and the question is going to be deleted, flag for moderator attention. No need to limit or discourage deleting low quality content just because it's a dupe with a good answer, merge is the correct action instead.

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