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As far as I understand Articles are official "how-to" guides and as such represent and can serve as canonical duplicate targets.

Allow voting to close questions as duplicate of Articles.

Since there are already established canonicals, closing Articles as duplicates of regular Q/A should also be possible.

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    I'd argue that if we allow this, we should allow the reverse too, closing an article as a duplicate of a well-established canonical. Else, we'd get an angle for abuse, converting highly viewed and appreciated Q&A to an article that immediately gains the views the Q&A got.
    – Erik A
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 11:29
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    @ErikA Good suggestion. I edited the post.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 11:34
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    I doubt collectives will live for long. It's "Documentation 2.0"... a dying project . So if a lot of questions gets closed as article dupes, there will be a lot of clean up when Collectives sees the end.
    – 4386427
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 11:48
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    Perhaps better, @ErikA, would be for an article to just display the actual content of the Q&A inline. Then, we could create articles that simply "wrap" existing, high-quality canonicals. The votes cast on the article would be re-directed to the original Q&A.
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 11:49
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    @CodyGray "The votes cast on the article would be re-directed to the original Q&A" Redirected to what? It would be wrong to redirect vote to question, because article is not a question and in case there are multiple answers, which one should be upvoted?
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 11:54
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    I'm not trusting articles enough for that. Let's discuss this at a later time if they have proven themselves. One thing I really don't like about articles is that I cannot simply add my own opinion in case I think an article is wrong. I guess that articles might age even faster than questions and answers.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 12:13
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    @Trilarion I agree with you regarding to trust and inability to add own answers and let the community vote decide which one is the best. But if we don't trust articles and they cannot be used as duplicate targets, that means they are feature that does not fit well in current site and workflow. Discussing things at later time will only make everything worse. This whole "collective" thingy either needs to be properly integrated fast, or it will leave huge mess when it fails.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:00
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    It annoys me that the moderation perspectives weren't considered in advance. If articles are released to everyone in a collective (as in, the feature isn't restricted to a few users), it's just gonna end up being an easy way to farm rep with little to no effort, and no actual contribution to the overall Q&A.
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:07
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    @Zoe I would say that moderation aspect of anything in Collectives was not thoroughly considered.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:12
  • In this case it doesn't need to be integrated fast. If we do not close question as duplicates of articles for, say, the next four weeks, we only have to close more later on, when we decide to do so, otherwise nothing changes. It's just more work. But in, say, four weeks, we'll hopefully have enough articles to judge how high quality they actually are and if they are good and stable enough to be used as duplicate targets. And I still wonder how one can correct errors in articles. I would rather have competing articles but that doesn't seem possible easily. Maybe articles won't fly.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 15:33
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    @Trilarion My point is, if it cannot be integrated fast, it probably cannot be integrated at all. I am not talking about how much time is needed to implement feature, I am talking about workflow. Since Articles and Collectives have been dumped on us, the only way to figure out all ins and outs is to suggest integration and workflow features. If the feature as concept does not fly well, that can potentially show not only that feature request is flawed, but the Collectives feature itself also has flaws.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 15:49
  • Okay, if only articles were more similar to Q&A, maybe something like a self-answered Q&A with less focus requirements and the ability to provide alternatives, it would fit more easily and I would count them as eligible duplicate targets, but will articles become that? I doubt it. That's why I want to know more about them first. We could simply treat them as "external" content. No difference between your personal blog or your article which is hosted here. It can be used as source of research but not yet as duplicate target. It's not clear how to post competing articles, I rather mistrust them.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 16:08

2 Answers 2

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NO.

This would be an extremely bad idea. The contents of an article are entirely controlled by the author (and/or the collective admins). It is not editable by the community, and it does not allow the community to write alternative answers. An article presents a single point of view that cannot be influenced or altered by the community. As it cannot be reasonably be curated by the community, it should not be part of any community processes such as question closure.

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    What really bothers me is that you can vote on articles, and there's no actual control over the content in articles. There's no obvious moderation of any kind from outside the collective, anyhow. Articles are gonna be fundamentally flawed in terms of spam protection, as well as duplicate protection. More importantly, "An article presents a single point of view that cannot be influenced or altered by the community" - correct, but you still gain and lose rep like it's a normal answer.
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:04
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    Articles should arguably be held up to the same standards as questions and answers as long as there's rep involved. They brought over the part that made documentation fail, but additionally implemented no protection against content duplication internally within said new feature. Having curation of the articles is arguably the only way they won't end up being a prime way of just getting rep by saying the same thing for the nth time
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:04
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    Honestly, the only good argument against implementing moderation in articles is if the sentence that comes after it is "because we're removing articles from the public Q&A"
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:10
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    @Zoe yeah, I'm not sure why they decided to make articles give rep, as that was one of the big reasons why docs failed - too many people spammed garbage or copypasted docs in hopes of getting upvotes. The voting part itsef is fine IMO, it should just be entirely decoupled from reputation. The protections around articles seem to be entirely based around pre-approval by Collective admins, which seems like it would be a lot of work if done seriously (or seriously flawed if it's just being rubber-stamped).
    – l4mpi
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:15
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No thanks.

"Articles" belong to the "collective", and if anything are just an endorsed blog post or documentation piece . No additional answers can be added to the "article", and further edits depend exclusively on the "collective" admins.

Additionally, there is no long-term guarantee that the 'collective' experiment is going to last. If in two years time "collectives" stop making business sense, since they are mostly a tag grouping they can disappear harmlessly. If, on the other hand, we start making existing regular Q&As depend on "collective articles", it's another headache for future-us.

But fundamentally, the issue is that "articles" are not questions. We already have canonicals we can choose as dupe targets. We gain nothing by being able to target "articles" instead of regular SO questions. If an article is good enough as a canonical, it can be posted as a Q&A. Having more Q&As is good.

If it doesn't fit the Q&A model... then why would it be an adequate dupe target? We do not dupe close to external documentation articles.

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