2

There is a question, How to promote code reuse and documentation?, which I think is well worded, but new and only got a few average answers so far. It was also suggested that it's a duplicate of How Visual Studio could help to avoid duplicating code?, but the later is low voted and the wording is more specific and not really similar. But that question has a very good generic answer that would be perfectly applicable to the first question.

Should it be closed as duplicate? They don't look like ones. Or should they be merged? Or is there some other way to make the answer visible on this question?

3
  • I would ask Yannis on how these questions could be manually merged - if memory serves he has done quite a lot of stuff like that per stci efforts. If Yannis, with his experience, finds it hard to merge, I'd consider un-duplicating the questions, probably along with some editing that would make it look less similar
    – gnat
    Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 9:24
  • Well, the question only got 2 close votes, so it's not closed. But it would benefit from bringing in that answer.
    – Jan Hudec
    Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 11:47
  • 3
    @gnat I would definitely not merge the questions. The OP never even mentions Visual Studio, and it's possible they're in an environment that doesn't use VS at all. Jan, I think adding a comment linking to the relevant answer is is a great way of pointing users to it, or if you want you can also summarize that answer into an answer of your own - just be sure you give proper credit to the original answer and include a link to it.
    – Rachel
    Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 16:57

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Well how about having functionality by which people can submit links to answers/comments (on other pages of SE) to any questions and SE to populate those answers/comments inline (like when we copy paste links to questions in SE chat rooms). Those links can be upvoted/marked as an answer. This would be better approach to just commenting "Possible duplicate of ..." and we up voting that comment, (and finally closing that question too early) as we would be directing people to exact answer that we want to suggest. Of course that will need creation of permalink to every comment/answer.

But again that may need generation of more amount of content at SE's backend and may discourage people from doing initial googling.

However, this will make answers visible on the more appropriately asked question. Also no merging of questions will be required.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .