What is a duplicate (question)?

Duplicate questions are questions that should have the exact same answer. We see a lot of 'I dropped my iPhone in Apple Juice, what should I do?' and then someone else asks, 'HALP the Orange Juice has attacked my iPhone!'

Those two questions functionally have the same answer. The second person has a valid question, so we don't want to attack them for not understanding the system. It's also very useful for google to see as many phrasings of a question as possible.

Marking the second question as a duplicate automatically gives it all the answers from the first question. This is a great situation for the person who asked the question—they get a nice answer—and for us, because we don't have to write the same answers over and over.

The trick here is that it requires judgment to know whether a question is truly an exact duplicate. Perhaps the lower Ph value of Orange juice impacts the troubleshooting procedure. That's why there's voting on this—we need to decide together on a case-by-case basis.