“He Said”/ “She Said” questions - shall we merge these?

Question

This question:

alternatives to “he said” in dialog

...was recently flagged as a duplicate of this older question:

I'm getting tired of “he said” “she said” in dialogue; how do I get around it?

Both questions are good ones, and they cover more or less the same ground. They could be seen as duplicates, or they could be seen as complimentary. (Duplication is not the terrible sin it used to be in the earlier days of Stack Exchange; this blog post has more info on that.)

Personally, I'd like to take the answers to the older question and merge them into the newer, more complete question; but I don't think it'd be a big deal if we left it alone. This is something the community hasn't really discussed all that much lately. How do we feel about duplicate questions?

Should we merge these two questions? (Someone will lose reputation if we do that.) Or should we leave it alone?

Answer 1

I'd leave it alone. They are similar, but the questions and answers are good on both.

Answer 2

You do not have to merge them. If you just close one as the duplicate of the other, than a link to the other answers exists and that's the main goal of closing questions as dupes.

If you do not merge them (what you do not need), you can also add a link (in the comments) from the not closed to the closed question.

Third option would be closing none and linking both. I leave that up to you. :)