If 2 questions are same, then which one should be merged?

Question

If there are two exact questions, then which should be merged with which one ??

in my personal belief; shouldn't be that the question with less up-votes be merged with the one having more up-votes, because I believe that a question which gets more up-votes is probably where the audience landed first because of more relevant title, and the understandable language and relatable content lead to it's upvote??

This i speak in reference to my question having 65 upvotes being merged with the one having mere 20 !

Answer 1

I believe that a question which gets more up-votes is probably where the audience landed first because of more relevant title, and the understandable language and relatable content lead to it's upvote??

As far as I understand it the site is actually smarter than that. The text and titles from both questions are indexed by Google and both sets of titles/text help get the person on the proper page.

we want some of these merge stub questions hanging around so people can find two “identical” questions that were asked in two totally different ways. The exact, perfect duplicate question, in my experience, is much more rare than people think.

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improved-question-merging/

I wouldn't worry too much, your post has 86k views (so it's likely not up for deletion) and at the end of the day getting people to one page to answer the question is what's really important.

Answer 2

Questions are duped and merged in different ways.

If the questions are the same they are usually closed newer --> older. Sometimes though, if one question has more views than another or seems much better written, they will be duped and perhaps merged to reflect that.

Now about this specific question. I meant to merge them the other way around, since your question had many more views (it has nothing to do with upvotes), but I must have gotten my links mixed up.

Answer 3

They should have been closed fast instead. Age, views or upvotes doesn't matter, the target of the merge should be the question with better quality overall.