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I think that Resetting Ubuntu to factory settings would benefit from an answer that explains at beginner level that Ubuntu does not have a factory reset per se, but discusses various ways a system can be recovered, linking to high quality posts on methods for different situations and summarising them, and/or giving easy to follow instructions on how to do them. If this meta answer is well received, I will bounty this question to encourage such an answer (or if someone preempts me, I will award one retrospectively :) ).

I think that Resetting Ubuntu to factory settings would benefit from an answer that explains at beginner level that Ubuntu does not have a factory reset per se, but discusses various ways a system can be recovered, linking to high quality posts on methods for different situations and summarising them, and/or giving easy to follow instructions on how to do them. If this meta answer is well received, I will bounty this question to encourage such an answer (or if someone preempts me, I will award one retrospectively :) ).

In this case, the close direction seems to be correct from this perspective.

            before closure  |  after closure
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            | up  |  down   |   up  |  down
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target      |  1  |   10    |   2   |   2
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duplicate   | 17  |   29    |   1   |   8 

¹ _{Also, posts closed as duplicate which have no answers will auto-redirect to their targets for unregistered users.}
² _{Anonymous votes are misnamed, because all votes are very nearly anonymous. These votes are the ones cast by users whose votes do not affect the score of the post. This applies to all votes by unregistered visitors (and people who haven't signed in), upvotes cast be users with less than 15 reputation, and downvotes cast by users with less than 125 reputation. Perhaps I should call them something else, like "silent votes" or "soft votes" or "non-scoring votes".}
³ _{As far as I know it is possible by directly rewriting the relevant parts of the database, but this could only be done by community managers (SE employees) and they probably wouldn't be very happy to have that extra work.}
⁴ _{There have been a few feature requests on MSE for that to be changed. Meanwhile you can use this query to find any answers of your own which have been moved by a merge and check they they don't require editing to make sense in their new context.}

            before closure  |  after closure
          -----------------------------------
            | up  |  down   |   up  |  down
---------------------------------------------
target      |  1  |   10    |   2   |   2
---------------------------------------------
duplicate   | 17  |   29    |   1   |   8 

¹ _{Also, posts closed as duplicate which have no answers will auto-redirect to their targets for unregistered users.}
² _{Anonymous votes are misnamed, because all votes are very nearly anonymous. These votes are the ones cast by users whose votes do not affect the score of the post. This applies to all votes by unregistered visitors (and people who haven't signed in), upvotes cast by users with less than 15 reputation, and downvotes cast by users with less than 125 reputation. Perhaps I should call them something else, like "silent votes" or "soft votes" or "non-scoring votes".}
³ _{As far as I know it is possible by directly rewriting the relevant parts of the database, but this could only be done by community managers (SE employees) and they probably wouldn't be very happy to have that extra work.}
⁴ _{There have been a few feature requests on MSE for that to be changed. Meanwhile you can use this query to find any answers of your own which have been moved by a merge and check they they don't require editing to make sense in their new context.}