How can a low-reputation users deal with duplicate questions?

Question

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)?"

• Create custom page templates with plugins?
• How do you create a "virtual" page in WordPress
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5248499/how-do-i-create-a-new-page-from-my-wordpress-plugin
• How can a plugin create a page/form in the front end?
• Create a new page in a plugin
• Making my plugin create a page?
• Create a plugin to create a new page in wordpress for each time a record is added into the database
• Create page when plugin is activated
• How to create a page template using custom plugin
• Create a Page via plugin
• Create custom 'page' with plugin
• Wordpress plugin, create page for API
• Create page from plugin, but have it completely hidden
• How to create custom frontend php page via plugin
• How to create plugin auto create page wordpress?
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31528391/wordpress-plugin-add-page-frontend
• How to create a Wordpress Plugin that has it's own "page"?
• when i activate my plugin i want to auto create pages with shortcodes

Answer 1

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.