@user21820 I have been working on wrapping up the semester for the last week or two, and have not handled more than a few flags. Thus I do not know.

Oh... I already replied to that...

Why was I pinged here again?

@Xander Sorry, it was likely my post, which I removed quickly after posting.

Ah. Okay.

That could be.

Alright... In any event, I'm beat. I'll try to checkin in tomorrow, and should be more consistently available starting on Wednesday.

@XanderHenderson I can see you must be tired, since you didn't even remember having replied. Don't worry about checking in, the other moderators are supposed to cover for you, or at least I think they should. You, just get enough rest, water and food. See you later! =)

Hello! May I ask about the reason behind some of my flags for merging being declined by a moderator? The given decline reason is confusing me, perhaps because of its brevity.

Dear @MathMods, it seems someone has serially upvoted my answers over the period 2:50 to 2:57 CT. Kindly reverse it and encourage the user(s) not to serially up vote. Thanks.

@TeresaLisbon The system will autodetect it (usually within 24 hours).

@TheSimpliFire Thanks for the reply, yes, I hope it will sort itself out.

@TheAmplitwist Thinking over it, I believe I understand. As an analogy, it would probably be improper if I went around searching for comments that said "Thanks!" and "+1", even though such comments are "generally" considered noise and it is "generally" appropriate to flag them. Similarly, I suppose that the decline reason is meant to indicate that one shouldn't go around flagging tons of duplicates for merging since that is an inappropriate use of the flagging mechanism.

(Of course, the analogy is not perfect. Comments that just say "Thanks!" and "+1" are usually automatically deleted upon flagging so there is little extra work for moderators, and so on.)

However, I think the questions that I flagged for merging should indeed be merged. The questions are almost literally exact duplicates, and the answers that are scattered around can all be moved to a single place. I believe this is exactly the purpose of the merging tool. I took into consideration the points mentioned here when choosing which of the duplicates to flag. In particular, I did not flag all the duplicates indiscriminately for merging.

The above is my understanding, after some reflection. If I am off the mark anywhere, I would be happy to be corrected. For instance, if there is something else I should know before flagging for merging, please let me know. I enjoy organising the content on this site, but I don't want to end up being a nuisance.

@TheAmplitwist The problem with merging is that it requires a fair amount of work on the part of the moderators. We have to check that the questions really are the same, and that they use the same notation (it is very possible for a change of notation to completely confuse the meaning of an answer).

My preference is to avoid merging, in general. Better to close one question as a duplicate of the other.

@XanderHenderson I understand. I took care to flag only those questions where the questions indeed were the same, and used the same notation (I specifically avoided flagging the duplicates that asked slightly different things, and used different notation). Of course, I could have been off in my judgement in a few cases, but I would have expected a different rejection reason in that case.

The current one says, "Merges are not really common, please consider that request only when it is really necessary". This sounds like the flags were rejected simply because there were too many at once, rather than on the basis of any individual merit.

Like I said, merges are time-intensive, and closing a question as a duplicate is typically fine. Unless there is a really, really compelling reason to merge (e.g. the same asker asked the same question twice, or someone is copy-pasting answers from one to the other), then we will typically decline to merge.

While I didn't handle your flags, the message "Merges are not really common" is spot on.

Merging does not happen very often.

@Xander I feel like you're rushing to defend things that I am not disputing.

The long and short of it is that we generally decline to merge.

@Xander I'd prefer to clock out of this conversation, if you don't mind. My intuition tells me that I'm not going to get anything more out of it. Thanks for taking the time to respond as best as you could.

@XanderHenderson I'll keep this in mind for the future. Thanks!

The Mathematics chat needs to be supervised far more than it is, because neither Ted Shiffrin nor robjohn are keeping matters within bounds. It's the place of too much gossip, distorted accounts about users on site.