Problem
Following the recent (re-)deletion of some (in my opinion) valuable questions, I flagged the questions listed by S.Mark for moderator attention and they kindly merged them with their duplicates, as suggested elsewhere on Meta.
So this has worked very well. However, this way only the answers are rescued, not the original question. This is probably unnecessary in most cases but I can imagine cases where it would be beneficial to preserve both formulations in the question.1)
Furthermore, after a merge, some answers no longer make sense because they address only a specific aspect of the question, or they take up a particular formulation/idiom of the question that’s now missing. Since authors aren’t notified that their answer has just jumped from one question to the next, they get no chance to adapt their formulation.
Here are two examples that address rather specific aspects of the OP’s question. I think that both answers are quite valuable (and the upvote count agrees) but both are hard to understand without the original context.
- Answer that analyzes specific suggested optimization
- Answer no longer makes sense (I’ve edited it slightly to improve this.)
Isn’t it encouraged to only answer aspects of a question? It should be.
Suggested Solution
I’d like to suggest improving the merge process so that the moderator executing the merge can decide to preserve the original question text (and perhaps the title?). The expected result is that the merged thread contains both questions, one below the other. Ideally, both question authors would be mentioned but that’s not as important.
A straightforward implementation would just copy the second question text below the first after a visible delimiter (--- or other question’s title). But since I don’t know how merging is handled internally, maybe a different solution is more appropriate.
1) Although it could be argued that in those cases the question shouldn’t have been closed as a duplicate – thoughts?
