Suggested implementation for Generalist badge

Question

1. Take the set of 500 of most popular tags on the site in question. Find and store the correlation of pairs of these tags, e.g. the proportion of the time that a question tagged c# is also tagged .net.
2. For each user, assemble a score by tag; for each non-CW question/answer, for each tag on the question, they receive a score in that tag equal to their number of upvotes, divided by the number of tags on the question, times 1 minus the correlation between this tag and the other tags on the question, per each tag (i.e. if c# is correlated 0.8 with .net and 0.3 with linq, then the user's score for c# in a question that is also tagged .net and linq is multiplied by 0.2 * 0.7 = 0.14). Scores for tags not found in the correlation table are not adjusted for correlation, i.e. they're simply votes / num_tags.
3. For each tag score, apply this formula: score = (score * 50) / (score + 50). (This caps the output at 50 and imposes an extremely tough curve of diminishing returns over 25.)
4. Sum the resulting tag scores. If the result is >= 500, the user qualifies for the Generalist badge.

The various constants in there are wild-assed guesses; the core idea is the methodology. It at least attempts to address the tag overlap issues that have plagued discussion of implementing Generalist. I expect it to be torn apart, but perhaps it's a start. :)

Please see also my suggestion for Polymath, which would be a gold badge with the same logic but 5x the awarding threshold (so 2500 if the 500-point threshold above were adopted).

Answer 1

I will look at this, but I can't give a specific time frame.

The general philosophy of the badge, is to award people who dabble in a lot of different topics but don't necessarily go deep on any particular one.

That's why awarding it is tricky, because we don't want to pile more badges on people who already have a slew of the things anyway.

Answer 2

I have a simpler suggestion for the Generalist badge:

• Generalist (silver): 5-10 (tweak this number) silver tag badges;
• Jack of All Trades (gold): 15-25 silver tag badges or 5-10 gold tag badges or something like that.

Answer 3

I think that it's better to go for a simpler implementation at the expense of statistical perfection. The point of a badge is to reward a behavior; in striving to get a badge, people do something positive. If the criteria for the badge are convoluted, people are less likely to strive to fulfill them and therefore less likely to exhibit the good behavior you wanted (any more than they would "naturally").

I propose the same answer that cletus did, but with tweaked numbers. Rather than having to earn 5-10 silver tag badges (400 upvotes on a given tag) to get [Generalist], you have to get 200 upvotes on 10 different tags (for which there exist tag badges).

Answer 4

If my math is right -- which it rarely is -- on SO, the 501st tag still has 194 uses. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that cut-off, especially considering that the cut-off will increase over times. I'd include any tag over a certain threshold. How about 50 to coincide with the Taxonomist badge (which is often earned through gaming the system)?

Answer 5

Having thought about this for a while in the shower this morning -- it's where I do all my important thinking -- I'm wondering if this still isn't too complex. I haven't followed any earlier discussion, so forgive me if this has been shot down before, but has any thought been given to a system like the following:

foreach answer in user.non_cw_answers
  foreach tag in answer.tags
    tags[tag] += answer.upvotes / len(answer.tags)
tags_meeting_criteria = 0
foreach score in tags
  if score >= S
    ++tags_meeting_criteria
if tags_meeting_criteria >= T
  award_generalist_badge()

Where S is the minimum number of upvotes needed in a given tag to qualify, and T is the number of such tags required for generalist. We could probably improve it further by having user.non_cw_answers only return the highest scoring answer for a given answer in the case of multiple answers.

Has such a system been discussed before? If so, what were the flaws seen? If not, what comments do you have?