My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about CoreWCF

Could you describe this? A lot of people seem to believe that closing or duplicating questions awards reputation. It doesn't.

The complete list of reputation gain sources is at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

I would contend that the "close as something that you have an answer on" is less driven by "I want more votes on the answer" but rather "I know where to find this answer."

Alternatively, if the person didn't close it as an answer you would instead have the person copying and pasting the same answer into the new question - which would accomplish the same thing (more votes for your answers) and further fragment the "one place to look" ideal.

From the perspective of the site and curation of information, a given answer should appear in one and only one question. Closing a question as a duplicate serves to further that goal. Copying and pasting answers ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320351/how-to-handl... ) to questions that would be duplicates is frowned upon. Diamond mods get such behavior raised to them as a system flag ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317988/ ) - "Duplicate answers (auto) - raised on each duplicate answer"

New Q&A of this sort generally gets written because people recognize that a question is commonly asked about some basic material, but nobody who actually needs the question answers (and thus asks it anew) ever manages to come up with a high-quality phrasing. For example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 was intentionally crafted in 2017 to make it easier to direct beginners who have trivial issues with Python indentation to gain a basic understanding of how it's supposed to work. (There are a few key ways to get an IndentationError that aren't caused by general cluelessness; generally those are still duplicates, but should be directed somewhere else.) In 2023, I did some site searches and identified hundreds of old questions that are clearly low-quality duplicates - more beginners asking basic questions about Python indentation; there isn't enough daylight between them to consider them different, as the underlying conceptual difficulty is the same.

This has nothing to do with ego. I don't know the original author, "Chris", and have not otherwise knowingly interacted with that person. But I (and others) did extensively edit the question - to help make sure that other beginners can see their own problem in the question, and to help everyone - people with a more complex problem, and curators trying to point people in the right direction - to find other questions if they're more appropriate.

The fact that a duplicate target was asked later is generally considered irrelevant. We want people to find the best version of the question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535). As a general principle, Stack Overflow curation doesn't care about when something was posted - only about how it holds up in the current moment.

> plenty with an answer lifted from the original.

Stack Overflow moderators take plagiarism very seriously. If you see a "lifted" answer anywhere on the site, please flag it.

In general, answering a question that you're actively curating is looked down upon on meta (it raises suspicion of vote fraud; and yes, moderators do care about that quite a bit, even if they recognize how broken the reputation system is) unless you've also asked the question intentionally as a canonical duplicate target (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) and you're writing a new answer from scratch. And proper citations are required for anything you get from someone else - whether it's another SO answer or something elsewhere on the Internet.