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One of the purposes of Stackexchange is to create a sort of library of questions, which is easily searchable.

Surely this means that when a question is closed as an exact duplicate a link should be given to the original question? (If I remember correctly, a link has to be given when flagging a question as an exact duplicate, so the link should be known!)

However, it seems that this is not so!

I first noticed this today because of the rather confusing situation that arose from this question. A somewhat obscure question about looking at $S_5$ in terms of generators and relations was closed as an exact duplicate, but no link was given. I thought it was an odd question to be a duplicate, so I wanted to find the original. However, it turns out that the question was edited after the closing to become a brand spanking new question!

So, was this question a one-off? Are links normally given on such occasions? From memory, the links are often in the comments, but this is not the case here, and is presumably not the case always.

Should something not be done about this?

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The link was added, but the user edited his post afterwards, removing the link and changing the entire question.

If you check the old revision, the link was added. But it is possible for users to remove those links, even though that is pretty much always a bad idea. The correct way is to roll back such edits that remove the duplicate link.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. I thought there should have been a link somewhere, but didn't think about the edits... I've rolled it back. $\endgroup$
    – user1729
    Nov 9, 2012 at 11:24

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