LQ Review: Add canned delete comment for link-only within askubuntu.com (should have been flagged as duplicate)

Question

Within the last weeks, I reviewed a growing number of answers from the Low Quality queue (or spotted them directly on the main site) that basically looked like this:

Follow the answers at askubuntu.com/questions/...

The author should not have written an answer to link the duplicate question but vote to close (or flag, depending on the reputation level) the question as duplicate.

The canned delete reason comment for This is a link-only answer (and not spam) does not really fit in my opinion:

“While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes.”

And I'm tired of always commenting something like that manually myself:

Instead of writing an answer only to provide a link to another question here on Ask Ubuntu, you should have flagged this question as duplicate of the other one. That way we can ensure that all good answers on the same topic are listed on one page and not spread over many small question posts.

Do you think we could add this as another canned delete reason comment to the Low Quality review queue? A suitable title would be This should have been a duplicate-flag instead.
Or do you think adding another reason will let the pop-up grow too much and reduce its usability?

Alternatively, we could also make the link-only comment dynamic and change it to my proposed wording if there are only links to askubuntu.com in the answer.

Answer 1

Great, but there's a corner case that needs to be addressed: many times it happens that two completely different questions have the same answer.

In that case questions can't be closed as duplicates, but at the same time it's useful to have a link to possible answers. I'm against deleting those kind of answers, as even if indeed OP didn't bother giving too much explanation about who, what, where, when or why, that kind of information is often very useful. If the answerer wrote something along the lines of "This could be done by doing X. See [link to question] for possible ways of doing X.", the answer shouldn't be deleted, at least not using the standard "Delete" button in the queue, as if they get deleted in-review that information is lost.

So that canned comment should be only for answers to duplicate questions, and not for answers to questions with the same answer.

The current wording may be read as implying that questions with the same answer should be closed as duplicate of each other no matter what.

So it should be more explicit that the commenter is talking about duplicate questions, so to not instruct new / misbehaving users to do even worse stuff.

Also, on another note, the current wording is very direct, and may come across as repriminding (and end up being too mortifying: "Instead of X, you should have done Y!"). While I often want to throw my laptop out of the window when I see link-only answers to duplicate questions, many times poor users just aren't aware of the workings. I also propose to tone the comment down a bit (including the abovementioned modifications and along the lines of the current link-only canned comment) to something like this (this is an example to show the idea, feel free to suggest better alternatives):

While this link may answer the question, and since the questions appear to be the same, it is better to flag the question as a duplicate of the other. The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place.

This still misses the fact the sometimes closures should be done the other way around etc but meh, we can't address everything in a comment. If someone has a good resource on that topic that could be linked along with the comment please suggest it in the comments.