> It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM.
Actually, it's not meant to be a forum. It's meant to be more like a manual, the manual that no one has written (because the SO manual [potentially] covers everything, not just one product or package or library).
It's meant to be a question and answers site, if they want it to be a reproduction of the manual they should just link to the actual manuals. I feel it completely defeats the purpose of having a community to help others if it's not meant to be forum-esque.
To do this, they've already got the tech to identify similar questions. They should just leave all the variations of the question open, and have a prominent "Similar Questions" list displayed for all of them. That would encourage question titles that express what makes them distinct from similar questions, and give people the option of finding the most appropriate variant and getting an answer for that specific variant.
If it truly is not a duplicate question, then it should not be closed as a duplicate. However, many people asking new questions either don't search or are unaware that their question actually is that other question.
Leaving a question open doesn't help any of the google users and instead makes it harder to find the canonical answer to the question as little tidbits of information are scattered around.
If the canonical duplicate target is insufficient in answering the question, add an answer to it that does a better job than the other answers.
Duplicates actually make it harder to find answers, now I have to go to 10 pages to find the different answers instead of the different answers to the same question all being on one page.
If the questions are significantly different enough they'll end up having their own page. SO isn't meant to be used like other forums, and if you need more help to figure out what you don't know you can jump in the Stack Overflow chat or go to another site like Quora or other forums.
By encouraging post duplication, you will quickly burn out folks who want to be helpful. I certainly would not want to answer 1000 questions that are essentially 1 question reworded 1000 times, would you?
Often times people just starting to learn or are new to a subject matter dont know what they dont know. So they might simply not have the capacity to realize they are asking a similar question or that an answer to another question will suit their needs. I feel its more beneficial to allow these people to ask their questions with the limited expanse of knowledge they have and use it to learn. Hopefully as a result will one day return the favor. The system now shuns these people and they never return or help and end up disliking the community.
>By encouraging post duplication, you will quickly burn out folks who want to be helpful
This is what the voting system is for. Any system that places a ranking level on votes should filter this out easily. There is nothing that says you have to answer a question just because you know the answer. Just vote and move on to keep yourself from burning out.