We often have the case where two questions are asked by users facing completely different phenomenon, but where if you have the right understanding, you can see that the same thing is going on in each case. In his answer to the meta.tex.sx question Different questions with the same answer, Andrew argues for merging these questions. This is good, provided it is clear to people seeing either of the symptoms that the answers address their problem.
However, in practice these questions are often getting closed as exact duplicates of each other. From the experts point of view, this may seem natural, but a user lacking this expert knowledge will see that instead of being given a solution to the symptoms they see, they are being told how to treat a completely different set of symptoms. Without an explanation of why the two phenomena are about the same problem, this is a failure to answer the question.
I propose that our policy in this case is either (i) merge per Andrew's suggestion, ensuring that the question makes clear that answers should address both sets of symptoms, or (ii) tolerate different questions with analogous answers, provided that links between them, and our policy is also that we do not (*iii) close questions about one set of symptoms as being exact duplicate of another question that deals with quite different symptoms.
This question is in response to the closure of Change abstractname.
babel
correctly. I added a link to the "canonical" Q/A at the start of the OP's question.