A new question was posted today that was a clear duplicate of the How do I know if food left at room temperature is still safe to eat? Question...
Said question included a link to a similar old question that is still open:
Is it safe to leave cooked poultry at room temperature overnight?
I ended up voting to close both of them as duplicates of the FAQ.
Is this encouraged or ... ? What should the "correct" process be?
I hope so, because I voted to close too!
In all seriousness, I believe this is the right thing to do. The primary purpose of marking duplicates is to help guide people to the good answers. The more questions we point toward the FAQ, the higher the chance of people actually managing to find it, and the less the chance of them thinking their new question really needs to be asked separately.
Less of an issue but still nice: it avoids late answers, which on questions like this tend to either rehash the same things as the FAQ, provide unsafe advice, or just totally not answer the question. We have the FAQ because we don't really need any more answers for this type of question.
I do also favor closing old questions for non-duplicate reasons as well, though in those cases it's mostly just about not leaving bad examples around.
