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Often when reviewing a question which you simply know it has to be a duplicate, you find the exact same question but it already is marked as a duplicate to a higher quality question with corresponding answer.

I now often flag the question as duplicate of the low quality exact same question asked earlier to give a hint to the OP why it is not a good question. That the OP now has to go to the duplicate of the duplicate to get his answer I do not mind, if he would have looked he would have found it himself and saved us the trouble.
However the purpose of duplicate is to keep it clean. If the question would be closed as a dupe of the dupe, it could end up messy for people searching. When it gets closed it should probably be marked as a duplicate to the high quality question.

So, flag it as duplicate to the exact same question or to the high quality question which might not be so obvious to the OP?

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    Please don't create duplicate chains, those are just confusing and unhelpful. We want to point to the best possible resource. The whole point of duplicates is to take a question that lots of people ask and point each one at the best copy we have, that way the many people that do search find something. Not everyone knows the proper keywords to use and so over time as duplicates build up the chance of them goes down too as more variations of describing the problem get covered.
    – Seth
    Nov 22, 2015 at 21:28

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That the OP now has to go to the duplicate of the duplicate to get his answer I do not mind, if he would have looked he would have found it himself and saved us the trouble.

is not necessarily true. Of course we all know questions which are sometimes asked three times a day, but remember that similar questions are not always easy to find, and in general marking as a dupe does not (dis-) qualify the poster in any way.

Many duplicate questions are in fact excellent questions, but they simply were asked and answered before. The idea of marking dupes is mainly to concentrate both good answers and voting to one single occurrence of repeated questions.

As such, some dupes can even be useful, since they point to the same question (when marked as a dupe), but were asked from a different angle, which improves the findability of the answer(s).

If you mark as a dupe, try to find "the original" question, as explained here. In some occasions however, there are two separated dupe "tracks", leading to two different "originals". I'd pick the one with the best Q/A combination then.

Exception

To the last point, I practice one exception however. It simply happens that questions are marked as a dupe "on the edge". In such cases, it can happen that a new question does find an appropriate answer in another question that was marked as a dupe, while the"original" of that one has nothing to offer. In those cases, I think then it is legitimate to mark a question as a dupe of another dupe.

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  • where is python ;P
    – Ravan
    Nov 23, 2015 at 4:29

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