Should something be done about the current duplicate statuses of these related questions on readied actions?

Question

The three following questions currently exist (ordered from newest to oldest):

1. If I Ready an action, can I then use my reaction for something else?
2. Reaction while holding a readied action?
3. Can you forgo your readied action to take an opportunity attack instead?

They are all extremely similar, and in fact, the second question is currently marked as a duplicate of the third. However, at least to me, it is quite clear that the first question is a duplicate of the second.

Note that the first question has one well-received answer, while the second question currently has no answers whatsoever, and the third has one very well-received answer.

What should be done about these three questions? Should the second question have its duplicate target changed to the first question? Should the first question be marked as a duplicate of the third? Something else?

I think my biggest confusion in from the logical inconsistency. If question 1 is a duplicate of question 2, and question 2 is a duplicate of question 3, isn't question 1 a duplicate of question 3? Which part of this is incorrect?

Answer 1

Close #3 as a duplicate of #1, and fix the dupe target of #2

It looks like #1 and #2 are identical to each other, and one of them should indeed be marked as a duplicate of the other (as you note).

However, the two questions are not quite the same as #3, which is a more specific subset of the other two; whereas #1 and #2 present the general question of taking any reaction instead of the readied action, #3 specifically asks about taking an opportunity attack instead of the readied action. (#2 does use opportunity attacks as an example, but it is not the primary question.)

Since #3 is a subset of #1 and #2, we should look at doppelgreener's answer to the relevant meta, "If an answer to question A can be found in question B, should we close A as duplicate of B?":

We close Question A as a duplicate of Question B only when all of the following is true:

• It's the same question, or Question A is already covered obviously as a subset of Question B. Obvious here means I can tell at a glance it's there.
• Question B has an obvious answer to Question A. Obvious here means I get a straightforward answer without hard searching — a couple of sentences buried in the middle of a post, or an answer which only sort of implies an answer to Question A, doesn't count as obvious.
• There is not some strong compelling reason to covering Question A alone, separately from Question B. (If the above bullet points are met this rarely happens.)

In this case, it seems like #3 should be closed as a dupe of #1 (despite #1 being newer), since #3 is fully and obviously a subset of #1; opportunity attacks are just one type of reaction, and there's no compelling reason to cover them separately.

(#2 is not the preferred dupe target since, as it was already incorrectly closed as a duplicate of #3, it has no answers. As mentioned above, #2's primary question covers the general case that #1 does, but uses the primary question in #3 merely as an example.)