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.

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 (modifications highligthed in some sort of differential style):

>While this link may answer the question, *and since the questions appear to be the same,* it is better to <del>include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference</del>flag the question as a duplicate of the other. <del>Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. </del>[The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place](http://askubuntu.com/help/duplicates).

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.