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In succession, duplicates are annoying and detrimental, but on the other hand, the best answer in 2008 may not be the best answer in 2010 and there's no easy way to update old questions and bring attention to their need for new answers.
The set of answers for broad questions at SO is gradually becoming stale and the new questions are beginning to become uselessly specific to the person who asks the question.
Maybe a way to append or revise older questions as a lower-reputation user would help, and doing so would bring the question back into the community's foreground to be seen by fresh eyes.
Edit: "They" meaning the website, the community and the SO engine combined, not necessarily one or the other individually.
'How long is the accepted answer to that question going to be up to date?' - hopefully as soon as FB changes the system and someone realizes the answer is wrong.
Pretending temporality doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
Ideally, a user could report something as out of date, or the ranking algorithm would degrade the value of an answer as it ages (which would be a problem for ageless Q/A situations like traditional computer science questions).
Stackoverflow, ServerFault, SuperUser, MetaSO does this new StackExchange really not fit into any of the above?
Joel and Jeff have said several times that "Google is the UI". So the segmentation doesn't hurt the "answer consumers", who'll come in through Google with little regard for which site is which, while benefiting the "producers", who do care.
You know what would make a really hilarious and likely-successful StackExchange site? One focused on http://BoingBoing.net -- it'd be all about how best to anagramize a subway map or break functioning consumer electronics by hot-gluing brass gears onto them, but there's clearly already an audience for Cory Doctorow's self-identity (just as there was for Jeff).
A site born out of an existing strong community of clever people can easily sustain QA around that communities' purpose. If it's a general-purpose community, then it'll work just fine: http://ask.metafilter.com is terrific and makes enough from advertising to pay 4 full-time salaries and essentially funds the rest of the site.
It's success was a direct inspiration for the creation of Yahoo Answers. You're well aware of it's existence -- you had one of the Metafilter moderators (Josh Millard) as a guest on your and Jeff's podcast, but you weren't very receptive to what he had to say (Jeff was particularly obtuse). Y'all didn't understand why you needed an outlet site like http://metatalk.metafilter.com -- and then when you implemented http://meta.stackoverflow.com the way you did it exhibited zero comprehension (the worst of which has since been cleaned up).
It's like you refuse to understand how communities really make sites like these function, because to do so would force you to acknowledge that your and Jeff's existing audiences were what made SO work. You've rejected that assertion out of hand over and over, insisting that the innovative design of your social software was primary. We'll see if you can launch successful vertical subsites for things like travel / fashion / music suggestions or parenting / romantic / job advice.
j/k :-)