I just answered a question about labels and cross-referencing: Is babel breaking my labels? The OP thought that the use of babel
with Russian captions may have caused the cross-referencing to be lost. However, this was because of an incorrect order in using \caption
and \label
.
Similar problems to this has surfaced before:
So my question is: If a problem/question turns out to be a possible duplicate after it was successfully answered, should it be merged (by voting to close) with other similarly answer questions?
Voting to close, however, only has 5 options to choose from:
- exact duplicate: This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.
- off topic: Questions on TeX - LaTeX - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to TeX, LaTeX or related typesetting system, within the scope defined in the faq.
- not constructive: This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.
- not a real question: It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.
- too localized: This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.
The easy answer could be: "None of the above options are valid in this case (since the others are not exact duplicates and I doubt whether it is too localized), so there's no need to close." This might very well be the case, since the above options should be considered more rule-ish (firm) than guideline-ish (less firm), otherwise more-than-expected gray-area questions might be closed than is necessary. However, I find the only motivation for closing a problem/question as a possible duplicate is to merge posts (a combination of questions and answers) which, in this case, might be true.
Opinions?
On a side-note: Even though the exact duplicate (firm) option when voting to close is the only one available for duplicate questions, a question that has been closed as such a duplicate only receives a possible duplicate (less firm) stamp.