7

I noticed Why do we need private variables? got closed as a duplicate of Do ALL your variables need to be declared private?, but I thought the first question and its answers were much better than the second one.

This isn't the first time I've noticed a question getting closed as a duplicate to what I view as a worse version of the question. This is probably because new questions get more attention, so are more likely to attract close-as-duplicate votes than older questions.

Is this something I should be concerned about?

Personally I'd rather have the best version of the question left open, and the worse versions closed as duplicates, but I'm not sure if that's something I should flag moderators over.

update

Question has been reopened.

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
10

Flag one of the questions and suggest that the closing be reversed.

1
  • Thanks Chris, I flagged it
    – Rachel
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 17:55
2

I saw the flag, but perhaps we could merge the questions? I am unsure if the answers will make sense or be terribly redundant if we do however. Please vote up or down on this to convey your opinion on merging the two.

4
  • +1 merges done by Yannis in March were quite impressive
    – gnat
    Commented Apr 11, 2012 at 6:09
  • Merges are great if the questions are exact duplicates, however if the questions are slightly different, then merging questions can lead to confusion, particularly when one question has answers with high votes that specifically address one question, but not the other. It ends up looking like the top voted answer doesn't actually answer the question asked. This happened to me at Gaming.SE where my question was merged with a very similar, but not duplicate, question, so the top-voted answer didn't actually answer my question, and I never got a real answer to my question
    – Rachel
    Commented Apr 11, 2012 at 14:31
  • 2
    @Rachel I tried to figure out how to merge the answers so that they made sense but there were just so many answers on both that I gave up and reversed the closes instead.
    – maple_shaft Mod
    Commented Apr 11, 2012 at 15:51
  • @maple_shaft Thank you :)
    – Rachel
    Commented Apr 11, 2012 at 16:35

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