Handling of duplicates: add backlink, merge?

Question

I marked a question as duplicate. After reaching 5 consents, the question is closed and marked as duplicate. Form the newer to the older question there is my "potential duplicate" link. Some finer details may be different, however. Now the perfect solution would obviously be, to merge the questions and at least the accepted answers, but this is really time-consuming.

Wouldn't it be helpful, also to have a link from the older (non-closed) question back to the closed newer ones for the potential differences or is the search function considered sufficient?

Answer 1

Where there are answers on both that you would feel as useful, the best bet is to flag for moderator attention, and in the open reason box, suggest a merge.

Once a post has been closed as dupe, it is very easy for a mod to carry out a merge.

We would not want a link from a question back to a closed one in general - for the ones that have no useful answers, we don't want to drive traffic to them; we'd rather merge the good ones, and leave the others as links to the good one.

This has been discussed on meta.so a few times. Most requests have been closed as dupe of this one.