Duplicate, remove the original or the duplicate

Question

There is an original question that has an answer that is deprecated.

And now there is a duplicate question that has an answer.

Which question should persist?

Duplicate question: Network unclaimed on Ubuntu

Answer 1

I voted to close the older question against the newer one as suggested by Pilot6, to make the up-to-date answer easier to find.

I would appreciate it if someone could find a way to improve the title of the newer question to make it less generic. I'm not sure what hardware info should go into it.

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Some extra FYI...

As pointed out in the comments:

• You don't remove anything when making as a dupe. – Pilot6

  Neither question is deleted when one is duped to the other, and none of the answers should be either (unless they should be deleted anyway).

  Closing a question, except as a duplicate, makes it more likely to be deleted automatically (it must be upvoted or have upvoted answers to survive) while closing as a duplicate makes a question no more likely to be deleted automatically than an open question. However, any closure makes it possible for users with over 10k reputation to vote to delete a question. But duplicates are generally valued and are unlikely to be deleted by voters unless they are of very poor quality or unsuitable for the site.

  Answers are never deleted automatically unless the question they are posted on is deleted, or the account of the user who posted them is deleted and they are negatively scored. They can be deleted by users with over 20k if they have a negative score.

  Of course, mods can delete anything they want, but they usually only delete things that have been flagged.

• Also in general there is nothing against marking an older question as a duplicate of a newer one (provided the new one is a "better" question or has "better" answers). – pomsky

  While you may well see users making the assumption that the first question must be "the original", no such policy is upheld; we try to favour clearer, more widely applicable questions and more comprehensive, more up-to-date, higher quality answers as targets for duplication. If there's not much to choose, votes and views matter, and those somewhat tend to increase with age, but age per se has no particular bearing on the decision of which question should be the target.

• There is also something called a "merge" but you need to flag for moderator attention... – Fabby

  Merging moves the answers of one question to another and leaves the merge origin question as an uneditable locked stub. It is arguably more destructive, and definitely more disruptive, than closing as a duplicate.

  Unlike closing, merging cannot be undone. IMHO, it should only be done when

  • There are no significant/interesting differences between the two questions so there is no benefit in keeping both (does not seem to apply in this case)
  • The answers on the two questions are good and different (otherwise there is no benefit in moving them)

  Another reason not to merge in this case is that the obsolete accepted answer would remain on top regardless of the direction of the merge. If the new question were merged to the old, it would also remain accepted.