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In line with the "badges and other rewards should encourage desirable behaviour", what desirable behaviour does the Taxonomist badge encourage?

  • Taxonomist - Created a tag used by 50 questions

Update: I'm not convinced that in itself having hundreds of tags that are infrequently used is actually a good thing. As an example I'll go through some of the tags with ~50 questions:

  • jqueryui (x51) - duplictae of jquery-ui
  • uml-modeling (x51) - each of these quesions would be better tagged as uml (x414)
  • fast (x50) - should be tagged with performance instead.
  • etc...

Once you get down to the more infrequently used tags it starts to become aparant that the vast majority of these tags should probably not be used as it makes it more difficult to find and group questions.

I just wondered if there was something else that I'm missing.

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  • 5
    Um, thinking up good tags?
    – nb69307
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 11:28
  • 1
    If there were tag synonyms or automatic retags, this would be less of a problem...although I don't really see the problem now, I admit.
    – Michael Haren
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 14:21

3 Answers 3

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5

If a tag is used in 50 questions, it is likely to be a good tag: People managed to find it when asking their question, and possibly chose that tag over other variations of it.

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4

I don't think it's a bad badge but like many others it has a serious problem: it doesn't scale. Getting it on SO is relatively easy (just like getting "Famous Question", "Great Answer", etc), while getting them on let's say Server Fault is much much more difficult.

They should scale based on the activity on the website.. The more Stack Overflow is popular the easier those badges are to get. Next year they will probably be a joke.

50 questions is now not enough for SO, imo.

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    I wouldn't say it's easy, unless you were on the site back in its infancy. Those tags are not awarded very often these days, and oten to inappropriate questions (e.g. subjective, fun, bounces between open/closed status regularly).
    – Ether
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 16:01
  • In fact I didn't say easy, I said relatively easy. It's relative to other less popular websites, such as SF/SU or any stack exchange website. Now I don't want to get into stack exchange which is a completely different platform, but just as an example: mathoverflow is fairly populated and yet no one got a gold badge with the exception of legendary and populist; getting a non-scaling badge on such a website is much more difficult than on SO..
    – Andreas Bonini
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 16:22
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My 2 cents:

Create          = New
Used            = Useful
Used >= 50 Qns  = Very Useful

Creating something new and very useful should be a desirable behaviour, yea?

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    See my edited question - I'm not really making the jump from Used > 50 times ==> Very useful. Bear in mind that the top tags have been used > 50,000 times.
    – Justin
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 13:12
  • @Kragen - perhaps the rep needed to create new tags should be proportional (via some function) with the number of tags already in the system. So no/few tags -> low rep needed, many tags -> high rep needed.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 13:25

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