problem with considering questions as duplicates of a question about terminology

Question

So we have this question: What is “my guy syndrome” and how do I handle it?. It is a good one, with a direct question, good answers: exactly what we wants.

The problem is if a new player/GM is experiencing the syndrome and wants to ask for it on this website. What will he do?

In the best case, he will search a bit for questions about "problem-players", or other tags he thinks are relevant. Then he will write his question (for example this one and even if the question about "my guy syndrome" pops as a possible duplicate he will just think that he is just looking for how to handle his specific case, not asking a question about what that expression he has never heard about means.

So in the end the question will be posted, and probably quickly closed as a duplicate.

How can we make it easier for new users not to post this kind of duplicate?

Answer 1

The duplicate-close feature itself exists to solve exactly this problem.

How it's supposed to work, is 1) someone searches and fails to find our canonical question on their problem, 2) they post a new question with different wording, 3) we close it as a duplicate, thereby creating a link between that different wording and our canonical question for future searchers. The next time someone has the same problem and uses similar wording, they are more likely to find the canonical question and not post a new question.

A few iterations of this with different wordings, and we then have a "web" of duplicates all connecting to the canonical question, making it easy for people to find it via different ways of phrasing the question.

So a new duplicate is not a problem so much as it's part of its own solution. We like duplicates: they help build our site's web of questions. We don't need to (and shouldn't) try to manually prevent duplicates from being asked, since that would just interfere with the system.

As a way of acknowledging and thanking users for asking well-written and well-phrased duplicates, I like to give them an upvote for their contribution to the success of our site.

Answer 2

Variations on a theme

I had voted to close that question because the My Guy Syndrome is the same issue. There are always going to be variations on the specifics of individual situations, but overall, the problem has been addressed and answered.

However, this does make it difficult to answer anyone's specific needs, but I had thought that the Stack was aiming to answer questions that apply to all and not just to an individual's scenario.

Prevention?

Unfortunately, I don't see that there is a way to help 'train' users in how to identify either the source of their problem or if it will even help if the jargon of "My Guy Syndrome" is more well known amongst the users. Ultimately, there are these types of people out there and tables have to deal with them and come to places like the Stack to see how others have approached it. I think that by letting them vent, and then showing them to My Guy Syndrome provides a space for them to learn and understand what can be done.