Meta Stack Exchange is where users like you discuss bugs, features, and support issues that affect the software powering all 153 Stack Exchange communities.

What is meta?
Here's how it works:
  1. Any Stack Exchange user can ask a question
  2. The community provides support, votes on ideas, and reports bugs
  3. Your voice helps shape the way Stack Exchange operates

I have this confusion all the time, I see people posting some questions which aren't exactly duplicate to other questions on Stack Overflow but with a little google search, the answer can easily be found on stack overflow for those questions. So should we answer those questions or flag them?

share|improve this question
    
Sometimes people answer the question beause they cannot find a duplicate, or because they are not sure that it will be closed. It happens that we see the same person both write a short answer and vote to close the question. That's ok. – Bo Persson Aug 13 '12 at 18:56
up vote 5 down vote accepted

If you have the rep, vote to close as an exact duplicate. If you don't, put a comment pointing to the duplicate, and others will pick it up and VtoC (I think this will be just as quick as flagging for a moderator, depending on how niche the subject matter is). Repeating the same answers doesn't really help anything, even if you repeat all of the answers and all of the comments. This just splinters the knowledge. Keeping the duplicate question closed can be helpful if the wording or content is significantly different (it can direct users to the same answers even if they used different search terms).

share|improve this answer
    
as i said before, the questions aren't exactly duplicate, but if they do a little google search they can easily get their way to similar questions on stack over flow, so in that case flag or answer? – Piyush Sardana Aug 13 '12 at 17:46
1  
That depends, if the questions are different but the ANSWERS still solve the question, then vote to close as duplicate. If the answers on the old question don't solve the new question, then regardless of how the question is worded, it doesn't sound like a duplicate to me. – Aaron Bertrand Aug 13 '12 at 17:47
    
okay, I'll keep that in mind. – Piyush Sardana Aug 13 '12 at 17:49
1  
If the answer to another question is likely to be useful (because it's related) but is not actually an exact duplicate, you can just post a comment with the link and something like "related question". If you wanted to, you could post an answer with a summary of that link, and what needs to be done to turn that related answer into a solution for the OP. – Servy Aug 13 '12 at 18:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/143346/should-we-answer-questions-if-the-answers-can-be-found-elsewhere-on-the-site/143347
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-07
69157
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DDYTB3ZG5PSZ6WZBPTY4SBS3OAEWLNV6
<urn:uuid:16dd12d9-11e2-43cd-a8c8-b807ac63c2d3>
2016-02-11T02:27:31Z
104.16.116.182
sha1:O4ORPLV2XHS2AMEQTY3IEO5QKAA4Y6GC
<urn:uuid:983aebfd-b8b7-4d23-9d07-88c69370f5a2>
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/143346/should-we-answer-questions-if-the-answers-can-be-found-elsewhere-on-the-site/143347
response
<urn:uuid:04649adf-1e5f-4673-9907-caa8802d8e67>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-07
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf