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Excerpt A: Venice Marco Polo Airport to Venice

Excerpt B: Marco Polo Airport Transfer from Venice

In Excerpt A, the question is a little bit more specific (giving information about the preferred endpoints), while the second one is more general, and can potentially have One Answer To Rule Them All (tm) which will allow closing all similar ones as its duplicates.

The way I see it, there are a few options:

  • Close B as a duplicate of A. This will surely frustrate the OP of B, since they have already seen A, and they are looking for more general info.
  • Answer B, but also link to A. Not ideal, since we'll have two nearly-identical questions, with useful information likely to be split between the two.
  • Merge A and B. Potentially good solution, but will require editing the question and also the answers -- requires too much cooperation from users which might or might not be willing to do this.
  • Answer B with a canonical answer, and close B as a duplicate. Personally, I like this one best, although it will require some work from an enthusiast to dig up all information and write a good summary of all possibilities. A small bounty may be offered to sweeten the deal here.

What do you guys think? Perhaps there are other options that I haven't considered?

3 Answers 3

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I think that options 2 or 3 are not that good.

But what about a fifth possibility?

  • Add a "canonical" answer to A and close B as a duplicate. This way the answers will be centralised in one single place.
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I think that for the specific case of Venice, it's silly to have two questions on the matter of travel between the island itself and the airport. The points in the two questions (St Marks in the older one, the train station in the newer one) are less than an hour's walk from each other. It would be like "sure, we have a question about how to get to Disney in Anaheim from LAX, but I want to get from the Hilton just across the street from Disney to LAX, which is the other direction, so I need a new question." What's more, unlike Southern California, there are really only three options for the Venice question: the bus, the alilaguna, and a private water taxi. You can't walk or hitchhike or the like, there's no Super Shuttle, you can't do a one way car rental, I'm not even sure you could ride your bike. The existing answers all have links to useful web sites and they have prices.

Bare minimum: edit the new question to explicitly link to the old. That way people who find the new will also find the old. But to stay open with that link in it would require, IMO, the poster of the new question to explain why the information that there is a 6 euro bus between the two destinations and a 13 euro alilaguna between the two destinations, along with links to schedules, somehow doesn't answer the question. Can you tell I think it does? But if the OP can convince us it doesn't, then I guess the question could stay. But it sure as heck needs a link to the old one.

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  • I was thinking more or less along the same lines for this particular question, but I also wanted to gather some opinions for what to do in the future.
    – mindcorrosive
    Nov 29, 2011 at 12:36
  • I think asking how to go from A to B and B to A are different questions. In this particular example, answers to both questions are extremely similar but for some other cases they may be completely different. For example, for some bus routes you may need to cross the road to take the bus to go back but sometimes you take the bus from the very same stop that you get off from the bus. This is an important difference for someone who does not know the area.
    – Basak
    Nov 29, 2011 at 14:23
  • @Basak: Indeed there might be differences, but as Kate said, if it's only a matter of crossing the street, I don't see any issue at all. One should always be prepared for changes in schedule or routes, and asking locals for help when in doubt should always be an option, regardless what random people on the Internet say.
    – mindcorrosive
    Nov 29, 2011 at 14:30
  • @mindcorrosive Might be off topic, but I don't see people with some reputation here as random people. In fact I trust them more than I do some locals, lets say passing by. Anyways, should I do anything regarding to the question, flaging etc. I got my answer and do not want to edit it.
    – Basak
    Nov 29, 2011 at 19:45
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I'm pretty sure that mods also have an option to merge questions when both have info of value that can be used as an alternative to simply closing one as a dupe.

But they would surely have to put a bit of work into such a merge...

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