10

I discovered that my question has been asked nearly 20 times (literally) since 2010.

I spent an hour reading and categorizing the questions and found 4 distinct approaches. No question covers more than 2 approaches, and most cover just 1. I'd love to spare the next person the pain of doing this, or the misfortune of not finding some good approaches.

In How to Deal with Duplicate Questions?, I like the idea of posting a canonical form of the question and closing the older duplicates. But my reputation here isn't high enough to flag duplicates yet.

Complicating things, some of the old questions aren't exact duplicates, so I'm not sure whether all should be closed. But all bear on the same general question, so referencing all in one place would be helpful.

Which of the following would be most appropriate for a low-reputation community member?

  • Post a canonical form of the question, and answer with links to the old questions, but leave the old questions alone.
  • Same as above, but add answers to all the old questions with forward links to the canonical.
  • Mention the problem somewhere and move along, move along. Nothing to see here. Let the authorities handle this.

As requested in comments, here are the question listed in forward date order. Two are from Stack Exchange. Between them you see the same solutions mentioned multiple times.

The specifics vary, but all 18 get at the same more general question: "How can a plugin provide a front-end page (whether real or virtual)?"

4
  • 1
    Please always link to specific questions when talking about them on meta. Duplicates can have far too wide and nuanced range for any generic solutions to apply.
    – Rarst
    Jan 3, 2017 at 17:44
  • @Rarst I'm happy to do that, but just to confirm: there are around 20 questions at issue. My concern isn't that all of them are exact duplicates, but that there's a lot of overlap between them. Should I really list all of them here? Jan 3, 2017 at 19:06
  • Sure, why not? :) How would we know how much overlap there is and what might be appropriate action (if any) otherwise?
    – Rarst
    Jan 3, 2017 at 19:21
  • @Rarst Roger that, thanks. I just didn't want to bury people with unwanted detail. Added. Jan 4, 2017 at 0:09

1 Answer 1

4

Having went through the links I would say that level of duplication between them is quite low.

While titles seems broadly similar, the specifics considerably vary:

  • by nature of created item, such as actual WP page, template for an actual page, virtual rewrite–based page;
  • by purpose, such as content, markup customization, form submission, API endpoint;
  • by data source, such as native WP data structures or custom database tables.

In my opinion these all are way too nuanced to be considered a genuine set of duplicates. Also difference make it unlikely to produce a single comprehensive answer either. Customizing markup for WP page and creating virtual API endpoint for custom table are far too different tasks to be sanely covered by single solution.

At most the appropriate action I see here is to flag some of these if they have exact duplicates with good answer.

Also note that questions which are significantly old are much less likely to be followed up by OP so it is harder and less relevant to produce good answer and spend time in general on them.

2
  • Thanks, this is helpful. But the original question was "How can a low-reputation user deal with duplicate questions?" As I mentioned, my reputation is too low for flagging dups in this community. I'm trying to give back here -- invest a little of my time to spare the next person some of the sifting and winnowing that I had to do. Is there any way for me to do that? Or do I go with the "move along" option, and let other people waste time since I'm too low-rep for dup-flagging? Even if these are too broad for a shared answer, I'm pretty confident there are some unflagged dups in there. Jan 4, 2017 at 17:22
  • 3
    The answer to “but I don’t have the rep” is commonly “well, work on that for now”. :) I get the urge to clean up, but often you will be doing more good producing fresh and quality answers, than dealing with old and unimportant messy bits.
    – Rarst
    Jan 4, 2017 at 18:05

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .