Are there ever good situations for combining questions?

Question

I'd recently answered this question, when a mod promoted it to the homepage from the tumbleweed bin.

This seemed to be a common question to me, and I found a similar question posted. This latter one has more activity, and more stars. Even though it has already been answered, it might make a better place to put my answer. Then the first questionI lnked could be moderated as a dupe.

I wonder that this is a good strategy, too, since the person who asked the question in January has been missing for many months.

So, my question might be: is a bit of overlap in questions better to provide more of a footprint, or have fewer very density answers?

Answer 1

I have contemplated a number of situations where the idea of combining questions has come up. Of course, in UXSE we encourage people to try and be specific about the problem they want to solve and provide as much context as possible, so this may seem counter-intuitive in some way. However, the range and variety of questions that we see on UXSE over a period of time makes this question quite relevant.

The best case I can think of with combining questions is when some of the answers become deprecated (so it doesn't need to exist on its own), but can serve to provide some background or context to an existing question.

An example might be something relating to technologies that don't exist anymore, processes or tools that supersede older ones. For people who are unfamiliar with the background (in the older question) but want to understand the context for the answer (in the newer question), combining the questions seem to make sense to me.