Recently when I've been going through the Close-Vote Review queue, and the existing votes are for "This question is a duplicate of (Other-question)", I've noticed many cases where the selected (Other-question) is also closed.
Should we be applying the law of transitivity to these cases?
- If question A is a duplicate of question B, and question B is off-topic, should we close question A as off-topic rather than as a duplicate? (If we want to make sure that the questioner gets an answer, we could link the possible dup in a comment.)
- If question A is a duplicate of question B, which is a duplicate of question C, should we Vote-to-Close A as a dup of C instead of B? (I recognize that in some "duplicate" cases, question B may have a better or more-specific-to-question-A answer than question C, so there can be exceptions; but in general I think going directly to C (or following the duplicate chain to its bitter end, if somehow it's more than 1 layer deep) should be the preferred solution.)
There's a lot more wiggle room (and not nearly as many occurrences, in my unscientific opinion) in the case of B being "Too Broad" or "Primarily Opinion-Based" depending on both the nature of question A, and the answers that B got before it closed, so I won't argue for those in general.
