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We need cleanup and merging of questions more than ever, and I suspect we'll need it even more as the site continues to grow. Take a look at this noob-ish set of near identical questions:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=relevance&q=decrypt%20md5

I could go in and manually add a comment to each that listed all the other similar ones. That would be a lot of work on my part, and thus not maintainable. Further, it's not a great UI for users finding the information, and it doesn't give the site the metadata of relatedness.

My first proposal is that we add for 10k+ or 20k+ (or perhaps higher) users that allows them to perform a search and use checkboxes to flag a set of highly-related questions.

Separate proposals would be ways of how to use this information on the site, and how to display this information to end users.

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There's already a reasonable way of flagging multiple questions that are found by searching. You can include a link to the search you used in a flag on anyone of the problem questions and provided your text in the rest of the field is sufficiently clear these usually get handled appropriately.

It's not perfect doing it like that, but I suspect if it's much harder to explain than is possible with 500 characters including a link to a search then it's probably too big a problem to be a single flag anyway.

Beware of this issue if you use "*" in any of your searches though.

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After thinking a lot about merging of questions I realize that a combination of closing as duplicate and deleting if too much duplicates are there is a good solution which should work right now.

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