What to do when you misidentify a duplicate?

Question

Normally I don't like to refer to specific posts by other people, but this is about my own mistake so I think it's acceptable.

I recently proposed this question about the equivalence of the Axiom of Choice and Zorn's Lemma as a duplicate of this question. This duplicate proposal was accepted. My original motivation for proposing the latter as a duplicate of the former, to the extent that it's relevant, is that proving something equivalent to an axiom is different than proving an ordinary theorem and I thought the answers in the linked question did a very good job of explaining this.

I would like to undo the duplicate association, based on some comments about how these two questions are really quite different.

I have three questions here:

1. Is there a procedure for undoing this besides voting to reopen the question?
2. Is using a moderator flag appropriate in this situation?
3. How far from the original question can an abstract duplicate be?

Answer 1

1. That is the first step, a vote to reopen, possibly adding a comment on the Question addressing what makes the target duplicate different (if you feel that the existing comments don't make the point clearly enough). Give that some time to work through the basic reopen review process. If it remains stalled after a couple of days, post to the canonical thread for reopen requests.

2. No, don't flag for moderator attention. This is a job for community moderation. If you are really anxious about promoting the reopen, then appealing to one of the chatrooms CURED or perhaps Math Meta Chat if you want to discuss whether the duplicate issue is rightly understood.

3. How far can the original question be from the proposed duplicate? It is a judgement call. Many communities, other than Math.SE, use the criterion that the present Question can be answered by referring to the duplicate target. It is my sense that Math.SE applies the standard differently (perhaps inconsistently). In some cases it may not be clear how that proposed duplicate will provide an answer to the Question at hand, and this justifies adding a Comment to clarify that, or to clarify what aspect of the existing Question is answered by the proposed duplicate (it can be hard to tell sometimes what the most important problem raised by new posters is, as a tendency for some newish users to give a "brain dump" obscures what help is really needed).