We've tried to capture the essence of this with community-faq. Take a look in that tag to see some examples. There's instructions in the tag wiki on how to submit community FAQ's. It's a fairly informal process, but there is some community review.
Generally, it's OK to close as a duplicate of a community FAQ if it answers the basic question, but it's OK for the user to refine their question and ask for it to be re-opened if the information in the community FAQ doesn't fit their situation or doesn't have a satisfactory answer. They would need to provide some information though about what they tried from the community FAQ and why it didn't work.
In general, with popular subjects like this, we want to develop high-quality "canonical answers" that give a good overview of the subject for anybody coming in with a popular question. For more information about the theory behind this, read "The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions" on the Stack Overflow blog.