Is there a list somewhere of the "canonical questions" for general topics like the "has this food gone bad" one? I want to close something as duplicate, but I can't find the question it should link to.
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2 Answers
This doesn't exist as an official feature. Meta sites tend to use a special tag for this called [faq], but it doesn't exist on the main sites.
There is a way to get close to it using SEDE. It is possible to write a query which finds questions that have been most frequently used as duplicate targets. It turns out that Glorfindel had already written one for Stack Overflow, so I copied it for our site: https://data.stackexchange.com/cooking/query/1630878/most-frequent-duplicate-targets.
These are not questions which are "canonical" by community decision. In fact, I don't think these decisions have ever been explicit, except for How long can I store a food in the pantry, refrigerator, or freezer?. Instead, people have gotten tired of similar questions, and written a more general one, and maybe mentioned "I hope we will be able to cover this topic now without the bothersome piecemeal questions", and the community started closing as duplicates afterwards. So they are questions which are used as canonical in practice, and the community has adopted them as useful resources.
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wait, we can run queries directly against the SQL Server database???? Oh golly, I have some uses for that. Aug 26, 2022 at 22:21
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Anyway, it might be worthwhile to create a canonical question/answer for "Is this food bad?" For all of the questions where it's not a matter of health regulations. Aug 26, 2022 at 22:25
I just drop a few related terms in the search box and go looking in the results for highest number of votes, usually. That often works, though sometimes the best one is not the one with the most votes, but it's usually on the first page of results.
