How to Moderate Cross Posts / Duplicates Across SE Sites

Question

As a follow up to “On the Subject of Cross Posting”, a question by RJCup3, how should we handle moderation of posts where the bulk (or entirety) of a question has been posted on multiple SE sites?

As far as I can tell, this hasn't been addressed on SPSE meta yet. The closest discussion occurred while the site was still in public beta (Closing crossposts), but that talks more about migrating questions posted to the wrong SE site, rather than multiple SE sites.

I've seen this manifested in both questions and answers on SPSE:

How can I hide a folder?

JavaScript array in SharePoint different in length from html?

What type is Number field?

Using Claims Based Authentication to integrate with an ASP.Net application

Add A SharePoint 2010 Calendar to Outlook

So the question here is how should we moderate questions that are cross posts (either openly or covertly)?

We can not close as duplicate with a link to the cross post, so what should we do?

Answer 1

Assuming we have a SharePoint question duplicated across SO and SP.SE (the most common scenario) the only options I am aware of are:

• Flag the SO moderator to close or delete the question on SO
• Flag the SO moderator to migrate the question to SP.SE and flag the original SP.SE question for deletion.
• Flag the SO moderator to migrate the question to SP.SE then an SP.SE moderator merges the two questions

The third option is the most time consuming for the moderators but is the only option when there are useful answers on both versions of the question that we want to preserve.

There are many older questions like this and we have to weigh up whether the effort is worth expending in each case.