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Normally I would vote to close a question which had been pointed out as a duplicate in a comment and which indeed was a duplicate. However, I noticed that the question concerned was originally posted in August 2012, over a decade ago. It occurred to me that the contributors to this site had significantly evolved and grown in number since then. Thus the question seemed worthy of a revisit, particularly since I didn't think that it had originally been answered definitively.

Now the issue gets more complicated. The question was reposted in March 2013, and that version was closed as a duplicate. However, this closed version featured significantly more, and more-definitive, answers than did the original. In my opinion, the question had been answered well on that occasion (but then who am I to judge?). Nevertheless, an answer to the originally posted question did provide some interesting analysis of the general background issues entailed in the question, which was not given in any other answer.

If it were up to me, I would close only the latest version of the question. But the general issue remains: are there cases when a very old question is worthy of a revisit?

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    $\begingroup$ If the question hasn't been answered well enough, in the opinion of any reader, they can always post a new answer to it. We do not need a rehash of every question every year just because some people are new to the site. Duplicate closure exists exactly to prevent this rehashing of the same thing over and over again. It is to direct all the relevant readers and authors to the key Q&A in the repository, not scatter them across a dozen pages in a dozen years. $\endgroup$
    – Nij
    Oct 14, 2022 at 8:54
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    $\begingroup$ In this case, merging is likely to be an appropriate tool, pushing all answers onto the Q&A with preferably the best version of the question, so anybody who searched for it or is pointed to it by a duplicate closure will see all the answers that are relevant, not just a time-biased selection of them. $\endgroup$
    – Nij
    Oct 14, 2022 at 8:56
  • $\begingroup$ @Nij : I didn't know about this merging option. How does it work? $\endgroup$
    – John Bentin
    Oct 14, 2022 at 10:10
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    $\begingroup$ Closing isn't deleting. Whichever of the two questions is closed is still on the site and available to all. So long as the two questions are linked. $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    Oct 14, 2022 at 10:19

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If a question is a duplicate of an older question, but you feel that the older question has not been adequately answered,

  1. vote to close the new question as a duplicate of the older question, and
  2. write a new answer to the older question.

If you believe that the older question does not meet the standards of the site, you might consider a context rewrite. I would not suggest flagging the newer question for merging into the older question (or vice versa) unless answers to one question will answer the other without any modification at all.

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