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Very recently a question has been asked about winning with K+Q vs K+R.

The question was a duplicate and thus was merged with the older one.

The problem I have with this is that the OP of the merged question did not took into consideration new answers and left the old accepted one, which is of low quality in my opinion.

Without false modesty, I believe that my answer to the question was the best, and I have found another 2 answers that provide quality coverage of the mentioned endgame as well.

Further more, the other low quality answers currently have higher number of votes, and I believe this will stay the same for quite quite some time.

Since this is such an important endgame, and for the benefit of other readers and our users, I propose to undo the merge and move the new answers to the original question as their quality is significantly higher, in my opinion.

I believe that this would bring us more visitors since this endgame is not so well covered online and as I have mentioned I have found 3 answers that offer quality coverage.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards.

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  • Once the site hits serious traffic, voting should become more active and dynamic. At the moment, we (me) are upvoting any useful answer to "make stuff happen" on the site. Yet in the future, my hope is that such key questions as Q vs R will have >100 votes on the best answers. I guess the future will tell. Cheers.
    – user2001
    Commented Mar 13, 2014 at 12:56
  • @RauanSagit: I hope so too. We can only wait for now... Best regards.
    – AlwaysLearningNewStuff
    Commented Mar 13, 2014 at 15:34

1 Answer 1

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First, I agree that your answer is very good, indeed, one of the best summaries I've seen about Q vs R.

There are a few considerations here, and several of them deal with the Stack Exchange system itself, not just the specific question.

Duplicate questions are not a bad thing on Stack Exchange - the extra question stays in the system with a different wording and shows up in search engine searches depending on what the search terms are used. However, it's beneficial for all answers to be in one place, not spread out over two or more questions.

This brings up the obvious downside - newer questions, especially ones to a question with an accepted answer, start at the bottom of the list with fewer votes. Stack Exchange has a few mechanisms to try to fix this:

  • questions with new answers show up at the top of the home page
  • new answers can be sorted to the top of the question by clicking on a convenient tab
  • old answers can be edited (an alternative to adding a new answer)

So with that prelude, there were basically two options in this case. We could either close the old question as a duplicate of the new one, or close the new question as a duplicate of the old one. The old question is not inherently bad, so the convention is to merge the new question into the old one. The only material difference is who the OP is - the person that can accept an answer.

To conclude - the hope is that the new, good answers will eventually be upvoted to the top of the question, but ultimately whether or not the very best question is accepted or not isn't a determining factor in closing duplicate questions. It is certainly the hope that the best answer is accepted, but if it's not, then the answer that the OP considers best is accepted, and the answer that the community considers best is immediately below that, as the highest voted answer.

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  • I guess the only thing left is for us to wait for the best answer to be properly upvoted. As it stands now this is not the case. Thank you for your clarifications. Best regards.
    – AlwaysLearningNewStuff
    Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 17:09
  • @AlwaysLearningNewStuff, one other thing to keep in mind is that, merging or not, the matter of what answer gets "accepted" is always in the hands of the one asking the question. And almost by definition, the one doing the asking usually won't be the ideal judge of answer quality, so the "wrong" answer sometimes getting accepted is just a part of life at SE. Just keep leading by example in contributing good content, and voting up other good content, and good things will continue to happen in terms of quantity and quality of overall traffic and voting on the site.
    – ETD Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 18:35
  • @EdDean: I guess you are right. The only thing we can do is to do a good job in providing useful answers. Best regards.
    – AlwaysLearningNewStuff
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 19:28

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