I don't totally disagree with you, and I'm actually glad to hear somebody else noticed the shenanigans. However, as a moderator, I sometimes have to distinguish between my own feelings and the community I'm suppose to serve. No doubt a good portion of that is also not impressed and I will explain why I did not stop this from happening.
If you look at the original question, it is very simple and brief:
Is there a 5V rechargeable battery and cables compatible with raspberry pi zero? I don't want to have to plug my raspberry pi in every time and nonrechargables get expensive.
Very likely there is one duplicate or another available for this. But: At that point it was actually a decent canonical form. It also refers explicitly to the zero in the title. Of course, the zero is not significantly different than any other model in this sense. But some things to consider:
We've had a lot of new questions about the zero like this, and they have proved very popular. I.e., they have been up, not down voted. And please do not now go on a crusade, I believe you are more of an adult than that.
Since people have also been eager to answer them, rather than telling everybody "No, please move along", this seemed like an opportunity to make the point in a friendlier way and help draw people in rather than push them away. It also gives us a dupe no one could take issue with.
It is also an opportunity to revisit and improve upon past questions. A frequent problem with questions from 2012 here is that if you close everything as a duplicate of them, no matter what, people will keep coming back and insisting they want an update. And frankly, not all oldies are goodies anyway. Closing duplicates does not have to occur in historical order. If a newer question stands a better chance of serving as the canonical case, then it is much more sensible to close older questions as a duplicate of it. It is not always possible to edit and rephrase to compensate.
As a bit of an aside, as they say there are two kinds of people in the world: People who believe there is only one right way to do things and people who believe there are usually multiple right ways whose ultimate correctness is not, and may never be, truly resolvable. 1 I'm one of the latter. I know that it may sometimes make me appear contradictory here.
Anyway, I took a couple of minutes to provide a simple answer (it's still the same) at the same time as Steve did (also unchanged, note they are three minutes apart). So now two moderators have answered the question, it is pretty clear which right approach we are taking.
Unfortunately, the OP then decided what he said in the first place is not what he really meant. I was very tempted to exercise another right way and hammer it closed. I won't say that I went against my better judgement though, because I did not see leaving it open anyway, to allow it to resolve itself openly, as a bad decision either. I did make my personal opinion clear in a few comments but gave the OP the benefit of the doubt as a moderator.
I don't regret that. Understand that we are not SO, EE, U&L, or a brain child of Meta. I have nothing against those sites or the general principles of SE, which I sense you are trying to be very orthodox about. In fact, I think I've probably argued more loudly for those principles here more than anyone else. Literally, anyone. However, as with all forms of orthodoxy, it has its pitfalls, and I certainly do not believe SE has achieved perfection in form and it is just a matter of properly applying that perfect system. I also do not believe we should feel bound by the imperfections and orthodoxy until such time as they change: That approach is actually a no change approach and implies we are already living in a perfect creation of a perfect being within which any deviance is therefore a corruption and devaluation of the whole.
I would like to believe that way of thinking died with logical positivism. Unfortunately, the computer scientists and other technically educated people who make up the bulk of the membership here and elsewhere on SE often seemed to have skimped on the liberal arts electives whilst getting their educations and we are bogged down in a perpetual version of The History of Western Thinking 101. Put another way, if I were to take one extreme "right" way of doing things at this point, I'd close this question and suspend you for having admitted to using voting in an inappropriate way.
That's not at all a threat ppumkin -- I like you and I'm glad you asked the question. I'm just pointing out if we are all going to play hanging judge all the time there's going to be a lot of hangings. I don't think that is in the best interests of the community in the end ("Whoops! I guess that wasn't the right way after all!"). That question was harmless, and as evidence of the fact that leaving it open was a good idea, we might look at the first answer to hit the floor after the OP changed the question, which I am very happy with and evidently so was the OP. It addresses concerns people might have particularly in the context of the zero, etc.
So, I hope you will reconsider downvoting that one at least. Not everybody capable of providing good answers is interested in office politics and I would hate to think that these politics stand in the way of people doing the actual fundamental work of providing useful answers to questions. Tai Viinikka deserves praise, not punishment for that.
1. The savvy will note an old python vs. perl thing here from the days when python programmers at the highest level had a significant inferiority complex and even felt obliged to pick fault with the TIMTOWTDI philosophy in official documentation. Ironically, if people really approached the world in a "we already have a right way to do all this" manner, python would never have existed because it is completely redundant in that sense. You don't want to hear it, but it's true.
