Question-related badges are far too easy to obtain. Badges awarded to those who ask questions greatly outweigh those which are awarded for answers. Of course, it doesn't help that there are more question-related badges, however the main culprit is the set of badges which are based on question views: Popular Question (1,000 views), Notable Question (2,500 views) and Famous Question (10,000 views).
Firstly, lets take a look at the top three badges for each category (Bronze, Silver and Gold):
Gold
- Famous Question (62,192)
- Fanatic (8,076)
- Great Answer (6,928)
The Famous Question badge has been awarded more times than all other Gold badges combined.
Silver
- Notable Question (345,834)
- Yearling (231,080)
- Necromancer (72,875)
There are more Notable Question badges than the second-most and third-most Silver badges combined.
Bronze
- Popular Question (878,622)
- Student (606,325)
- Editor (477,659)
As you can see, the view-related badges dominate all 3 badge categories by a long way.
One of the most viewed questions on StackOverflow is "How to undo last commit(s) in Git?" with an impressive 573,219 views, 2,410 upvotes and 1,143 favourites.
This is a famous question.
The three most recent Famous Question badges were awarded for "How to read XML file in android", "Scp command syntax for copying a folder from local machine to a remote server" and "What's the CSS style I need to make a readonly textbox control look disabled".
Combined these questions amount to 30,000 views, 6 upvotes and 0 favourites. One of which is closed!
These simply aren't famous questions.
Proposed Change
I think a more fitting system would be:
- Popular Question : Ask a question with 5,000 views, at least 5 upvotes and 1 favourite.
- Notable Question : Ask a question with 15,000 views, at least 10 upvotes and 2 favourites.
- Famous Question : Ask a question with 75,000 views, at least 30 upvotes and 5 favourites.