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These two questions came up in the "reopen votes" review queue:

How to permanently uninstall Microsoft Teams?

How do I increase swapfile in Ubuntu 18.04?

Both of these questions were closed as duplicates. Both questions also have lots of votes and at least one high-quality, highly-upvoted answer.

For the question about Microsoft Teams, I voted to reopen because this question is more specific than the questions that were deemed duplicates. The accepted answer to this question is also specific to Microsoft Teams, and the answers to the other questions are generic.

I believe the second question about swapfiles is definitely a duplicate, but this question also has a high-quality accepted answer with 140 votes. I am not sure how to vote.

I understand that even if the duplicate stays closed, it will show up as a "linked" question, but I don't like that a good answer to this question will not show up on the open question.

Ideally, I'd like to see this answer merged into the question that is still open. I'm not sure if this is something that moderators are able to do, or perhaps there is a drawback to merging the two questions that I'm not aware of.

What is the best way to handle reopening questions that were closed as duplicates even if they have a lot of votes and contain good answers?

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Are they not duplicates just because they're upvoted? If there are good answers you want to see in the dupe target, then the posts should be merged. I don't see any reasoning whatsoever as to why these posts aren't answered by the duplicate targets.

At any rate, this explains why the swap post kept popping up in the reopen queue without any justification at all.

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  • "Are they not duplicates just because they're upvoted?" - In the case of the first question, I don't think it's a duplicate; but I do think the second one is so I didn't vote to reopen it. I guess I'm not familiar enough with how questions are merged. It seems on this topic that there are some drawbacks to merging: meta.askubuntu.com/q/5641 Is it still true that merging would penalize people who answered questions that were merged?
    – Nmath
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 5:01
  • @nmath I disagree about the first one. I can see why you might think it is - OP didn't provide details on how they'd installed it, the answerer did. But to me that's not sufficient. If I can say: "Teams is a deb package, see dupe for how to remove one", then that's pretty much a duplicate for me. If OP didn't specify how they installed it, then that's grounds for voting to close as unclear even.
    – muru
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 5:29
  • perhaps... but I guess there is where I am torn and start to defer to votes. Votes are (supposed to be) an indicator of usefulness to the community. On the flip side, when it comes to close votes, I rarely vote to close an older question with a lot of votes unless the closure reason is blatantly obvious or otherwise necessary
    – Nmath
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 6:06
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    @Thomas Wards comments here: meta.askubuntu.com/questions/19900/…, seem reasonable.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Commented Jan 25, 2022 at 1:15

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