Non-duplicate question with answer in another question

Question

Regarding the recent question "How do I quickly find the official errata for any book?".

It was closed by several heavy users as a duplicate of "How do you tell if a D&D book is 3.0 or 3.5?".

The questions are not the same, but the latter question happens to have a very long answer that contains the answer to the first question, among other things.

To make things worse, this answer is the third answer from the top, and finding the information that the poster asked requires thoroughly looking at the footnotes to the long lists in this answer. Basically, without @HeyICanChan's comment pointing out the specific answer, the answer is really hard to find, and Comments are just not persistent enough to contain such important additional information.

To sum it up:

1. Are answers to unrelated questions, that happen to answer a new, different question a reason to VTC as duplicate?
2. Does this change if the answer is not the top-voted or accepted answer?

Answer 1

This is not a duplicate

The dead giveaway on this one is that one of the comments contains the actual answer. Trying to find it in the "duplicate" requires going to the third answer on a question that doesn't look like it's related in any way whatsoever, and carefully reading it to find a link buried in the middle of a paragraph, then editing the link because nobody who marked it as a duplicate bothered to fix the link so that it'd actually work. (I've since made those updates.)

People were very, very overzealous on this one.

A duplicate is something where the questions are basically the same, not where they're hardly related at all and one of the answers happens to contain a link buried somewhere that leads to an answer.

Answer 2

First: I agree it's not a duplicate. Second: That was closed as duplicate by either 2 or 3 users; two close votes (including my own) were simply to close that question as too broad.

Closing as a duplicate generally means either the questions are the same, or that they're close enough and there's already a clear answer in one. That answer doesn't have to be the accepted or most upvoted one, but it had better be obvious where the answer can be found. None of this is the case here; they're very different questions and the answer can't be readily found in the other question.

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This question is far too broad though.

This question does need to get closed and improved. It's asking what D&D 3e or 3.5e material has any errata from any source, including someone saying something at a convention, or an arbitrary magazine releasing an update.

An answer that hopes to be remotely useful needs to list not just what has errata, but also provide a link to the errata, instructions on locating it, or the errata itself. (Because, y'know, reading only "Complete Warrior received errata." isn't very helpful — you also need to know what that errata is.)

That amounts to an answer that might be as big as this one or bigger, and might still be incomplete.

That question needs to be closed, and improved somehow to ask something more reasonable. Maybe it should turn from a "give me the fish" question into a "teach me how to fish" question: how do I find out if something has errata, and how do I find that errata?

Incidentally, that's also why it got closed as a duplicate:

Voting to close as a duplicate. This answer lists how to find the updated material and errata, although links need updating due to Wizards of the Coast renaming efforts. – Hey I Can Chan 21 hours ago

Although I agree that how to find errata is far too buried in that answer for this to be clear enough to count as a duplicate.

Answer 3

Are answers to unrelated questions, that happen to answer a new, different question a reason to VTC as duplicate?

I don't believe so. Questions are there to be answered, that is why there is a 1:n on Q to A. In addition our site traffic is supposed to come primarily from search engines and therefore we should have many questions, especially if they ask for different things in a suitably different way.

I think that answers the second question as well. Well written answers can apply to multiple questions.

On the subject of the original question

D&D 3.5 and 3.0 are kind of special in that if a 3.0 has an associated 3.5 version, the 3.5 version IS the errata to the 3.0 book (in that you can basically throw your 3.0 version of that book away). What makes it slightly more complicated is that parts of 3.5 books can replace parts of 3.0 books. Such as the Shifter (3.0) being replaced by the master of many forms (3.5).

Therefore the question was a kind of unintentional duplicate, it was requesting the same information (with a different reason and wording), but the information did already exist on the site and a question did ask for it.

I think a better question might have been "Which 3.0 books and classes have not been updated/replaced by 3.5?" if you were looking for valid 3.0 sources.