up vote 4 down vote favorite

I just closed Global Redirect and www.example.com/node? as a dupe of Disable node summary page on /node path, and then realised afterwards I'd answered the duplicate question myself.

It strikes me that this might be seen as a conflict of interests.

In the spirit of community involvement, what would the community like mods to do in this situation? Proceed to close as normal, or just flag the question for investigation by another mod?

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You can always mark your answer as CW, and therefore don't get any rep. – MPD♦ Nov 21 '12 at 16:42
Totally forgot about CW, good point – Clive♦ Nov 21 '12 at 18:26
@MPD Making an answer CW just because closing a duplicate question doesn't make sense. Closing a duplicate question is better than answering it with a CW answer. – kiamlaluno♦ Nov 22 '12 at 14:37
@kiamlaluno I'm pretty sure he meant to mark the existing answer as CW so it doesn't get any more rep, not to answer the duplicate question with a CW post – Clive♦ Nov 22 '12 at 14:57
I understood that, but it doesn't make sense. Voting to close a question as duplicate, and gaining reputation from the answer given to the original question are two distinct things. – kiamlaluno♦ Nov 22 '12 at 15:45
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Hey masters what is CW ? :) – Nikhil M Nov 25 '12 at 14:28

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

I don't see a conflict of interest, in this case.
As you already answered the other question, you could have answered the new question, and gained reputation from up-votes. Closing the question as duplicate, and redirecting the users to the question you answered would not probably give you more up-votes than answering the new question. It is quite the opposite: With two answers you have more chances to get up-votes.

Deleting an answer given for a question you answered could be seen more probably as conflict of interest, as it could be interpreted as a way to remove an answer that could get up-votes instead of yours.

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That makes a lot of sense :) I'll let the question sit for a while before I accept this in case anyone else wants to have some input and might be put off by the answer being accepted – Clive♦ Nov 21 '12 at 18:25
up vote 2 down vote

For the part of the question of how this might be seen by an average user, as a fairly average user myself, I'd simply think "Clive knew that this question had already been asked because he remembered answering a question like it". It would seem perfectly normal.

Just my point of view naturally, but it seems perfectly natural that people will remember most clearly those questions that they themselves have answered, and therefore that they will be the people most likely to flag up dupes of those questions.

In fact, if the people who had invested time and effort in old questions refrained from flagging up dupes, we'd be reliant on a) people with exceptional memories for questions they'd seen but not interacted with, b) on StackExchange's not-so-reliable search, or c) on google which (hopefully) the asker had already tried. All these are less reliable than people thinking, "That sounds like that question I answered a while ago".

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