My questions were closed as duplicates. How come?

Question

I was going to reinstall Windows on my computer, but I wanted to clarify first some questions I had. So I started searching through superuser.com. I've found answers to my questions but they were located in the "wrong questions" :) Let us see:

My question: What are system, active and boot partitions in terms of microsoft?
Suggested question: System Reserved partition no longer marked as System

My question: What is System Reserved partition for?
Suggested question: How to Refresh or Reset Windows 8 without the System Reserved partition?

My question: What is MSR partition?
Suggested question: Are GPT reserved and EFI system partitions important?

So I created new questions and extracted there information solely related to them. Sure thing, I can find this information in suggested questions. But this information is a background for answers and people are asking about different things there. Also, some of my answers is a mix from several other questions. And there is some information I added myself.

So, do I not understand what duplicate is?

UPD

I asked it on MetaStackExchange, but unfortunately an answer with a discussion was deleted by someone, here's the beginning:

x-yuri> "the question asked can be answered by an answer from another question" - this way my questions are duplicates, but it leaves the other question open: "Any other question?" If so, it doesn't seem sensible to me. "This question has been asked before and already has an answer" - my questions "haven't been asked before". They ask about different things.

x-yuri> Actually it depends on what exactly you mean by "can be answered". My questions can be answered by other questions, because my answers are subset of their answers. On the other hand, they can't be answered by other questions, because they ask about different things.

Travis J> @x-yuri You copy pasted the answer here into your answer here and wrote a slightly different wording in a question. Not only is this an exact duplicate, it is borderline in violation of Stack Exchange policy in that it is not really an honest practice and barelyavoids the label of plagiarism. Barely. I would not continue doing that.

Robert Harvey> The way duplication tends to work is if the question asked can be answered by an answer from another question then the asked question can be marked as a duplicate of the other question. -- Wrong.

Travis J> @RobertHarvey - Should I respond to you with no and leave it at that?

Robert Harvey> "This question has been asked before and already has an answer." -- That's it. Says nothing about whether your question (if it's even a duplicate) is correctly answered.

Travis J> @RobertHarvey - That isn't always the case. Many times questions are asked in different ways, sometimes in non-related ways, but have the same solution. Those questions are almost always closed as duplicates of the question which contains the solution.

Robert Harvey> Doesn't mean that people are doing it correctly.

Travis J> @RobertHarvey - I didn't mention it had to be correctly answered. I said that the answer there was an answer to the question posed.

Robert Harvey> The question also has to be a duplicate. It has to have been asked before. This is nothing new; question duplication has always been about duplicate questions, not duplicate answers.

Travis J> @RobertHarvey - I have seen moderators do it multiple times on mSO regardless of the question itself being duplicated because the answer linked in the duplicate question was an answer to the question.

Robert Harvey> Only for canonical questions. That's the only exception. Canonical questions exist for the purpose of closing near-duplicates that are endlessly asked over and over, in slightly different variations.

Robert Harvey> Here is a clarifying example. "What color is the sky?" "What color is my car?" Both questions have the same answer, but they're not duplicate questions.

Travis J> @RobertHarvey - Wow, great example.. ? I will find you some real examples instead of the color of your car which is a horrendous misrepresentation of this situation.

Robert Harvey> I eagerly await your examples.

Later on, Robert Harvey says that although my questions are not duplicates, closing them was expedient, regrets that people judge if questions are duplicates by answers, not by questions themselves, even when it's obvious from the questions, and whatnot.

Answer 1

Let's see. You're:

• Taking existing content from other users on SuperUser and re-posting a subset of it in your own answers.
• Asking extremely simplistic questions which are of low quality and can easily be googled, and have already been answered multiple times on the site before.
• Repeatedly asking and answering your own questions with answer content that, while it's correct, does not add any value to the site by being posted again.

Someone searching SuperUser using our built-in search feature or using Google, Bing, etc. is going to be able to hit the same keywords in the original answers you copied, as in your answer. Your answers therefore only add to the volume of questions on the site, while contributing nothing. It's like you read answers, try to isolate a subset of that answer that you can ask a question about, then ask that question and answer it using the other user's content.

Although yes, all the content on the site is under a Creative Commons license, I personally feel that it is bad manners to post someone else's words verbatim -- especially in the quantities that you've done so in your answers -- when you are lifting the words straight from SuperUser itself.

Now, if you were quoting someone on another site, say, unix.stackexchange or stackoverflow, I would have less of a problem with that, because we as a community do not consider a question to be a "Duplicate" if the duplicate question is found on another site within the StackExchange network. That's because someone searching only SuperUser in particular will be able to find what they're looking for if we take the question/answer from another site and post it here.

But just because I just said that "we don't consider copy-pasting from other sites to be duplicates", does not mean you automatically have a license to copy and paste every valid question/answer from every other site that happens to be on-topic on SuperUser. We require questions to represent actual problems that you are facing in the real world -- so if you are asking about something and that something is not causing you a problem with your actual computing environment, then you shouldn't ask it. We impose this policy because any suggested remedies or knowledge conveyed by the answers can't be properly evaluated by you in order to select which one is the best accepted answer, unless you are facing the problem and can therefore take the answer's advice, try it out, and see if it works.

To be honest, it seems like you are just trying to find a way to get easy reputation. I may be reading too much into your activity, but that's what it appears to be.

Answer 2

The asumption here is that the information itself is duplicated, not based on the way that the question is asked. It IS!
The asumption is also that the information is found easily when searching for it. It Is NOT!

Taking the other side of this debate, I find that the information is NOT found when searching for it. that more is better. If I search for the info Now that I know the search terms, I will of course come up with it, but people do not always know what to search.

Many times the wording of the searching, plus adding in the huristic searching that google applies, takes the person further away from finding an answer, and puts them (instead) into the boat of hundreds , clicking the same non-answers that are clicked on when searching for it.

The assumption here is that the SuperUser site does not need redundant repetitions of similar data. On one side that is a correct assumption, because often people will point out where the information can be found. On the other side, presenting the data for a specific question (even if the answers can be extracted out of previous answers) refines it also.

As long as the back button on my browser is functional, I do not have a problem with it. While I would still agree with the assessment that the questions are duplicated, I think the site would benefit by the presence of them exisiting.

To achive some sort of balance between the 2 ideas, would be to have the question marked as duplicated, and for that to remain on the system for future referance and cross linking. I hate following extended links to dead end answers, it would be refreshing to follow links to real answers that solve the problems and answer the questions.

I am not reading the whole of it all, but (from what I read of them) you have culled out relevent information pertaining directally to the exact question that is presented. Other than the debate about it, I think the idea works. I do not think it will ever work on this site though.

Answer 3

Okay, let me share the way I see it.

They are not duplicates. They are related questions. They share 1) content of answers (the quotes) and 2) topic. But they 1) have different phrasing, 2) ask about different things, 3) have different actual problems behind them. I can't believe there are people who seriously call them duplicates. Did you read the edited versions? Some of the information is duplicated, but not the questions themselves. It reminds me of Orwell and doublethinking.

I can understand if you say you're trying to make yourself less work to do. Questions like mine doesn't worth it and so on. I can understand if you say that questions must have actual problems behind them. You're putting much more effort into it and have much more experience with it. So you should know better if it makes sense or not. But let us finally call things by their proper names. Otherwise make yourself clear in Help Center. When did you last read these articles? One of them contain link to Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication. And they're talking there about questions which even I consider duplicates.

There is a value in having these questions. Presenting users with answers for the questions they're searching for is a good thing. They: 1) don't need to inspect related questions, 2) won't create a "duplicate" because they didn't find the question, they were searching for. Again, already mentioned article suggest even more liberal approach than mine.