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I am, apparently, one of 12 people with the gold tag badge for and one of 39 people with the gold tag badge for here on meta.se. I hadn't realized this until I cast a close as duplicate vote, then was shocked (and awed) by the power unleashed. Unicorns came from everywhere and swept the question off into duplicate land so fast I was left breathless!

While I certainly don't mind thinking of myself as a feature request or discussion expert, given that you have to tag every question with at least one of the four tags, , , , then being an expert in these tags may not mean as much, since they are so general and prevalent. Other gold tag badges would indicate expertise in a specific area, such as , or , but the required tags are fairly non-specific.

There are only 76 people with gold badges in these required tags, so it's probably not a problem to be fixed immediately, and I'll just have to be more thoughtful about my dupe closing here on meta, but consider removing required tags from these new powers on sites where specific tags are required.

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  • 2
    I know this was brought up before, but can't find it. Either it got deleted or the keywords are not obvious.
    – psubsee2003
    May 22, 2014 at 22:36
  • @psubsee2003 Searching for posts on meta about meta can be an exercise in frustation. We obviously need a meta-meta. And we should keep building them until the final meta^n has no questions.
    – Pollyanna
    May 22, 2014 at 22:53
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    See “Yes, you are now a Superhero, able to wield the mighty Mjölnir”.
    – tchrist
    May 22, 2014 at 23:29
  • @tchrist Yes, that is the power I'm talking about. I'm wondering if it should also be applied in cases where required tags result in gold badges.
    – Pollyanna
    May 22, 2014 at 23:36
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    I'm gonna reopen this and see about some discussion internally. I personally think "disable this for required tags on meta" is sufficiently different from "let mods decide which tags to exempt" to at the very least deserve a separate response.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    May 23, 2014 at 0:05
  • @Adam: We already have a meta tag for that (with the synonyms mse, meta-stack-exchange and, yes, meta-meta), people just need to learn to use it.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    May 23, 2014 at 0:29
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    If you had the gold badge in all four required tags, you could insta-dupe-hammer any question on Meta. Think of the power!
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 23, 2014 at 0:55
  • @animuson True. One could argue that if you did have over a thousand upvotes on over 200 questions of each tag, though, you probably had a pretty good grasp of the content on meta. That being said, I'm halfway there!
    – Pollyanna
    May 23, 2014 at 0:58
  • Discounting moderators (who have the ability anyway) no one has yet gained a gold badge in all four. Waffles has three, is missing support, Robert Harvey, and Bill the Lizard have three and are only missing bug.
    – Pollyanna
    May 23, 2014 at 1:06
  • I'm on my way to gold bug and support. That will be a glorious day, DON'T TAKE THE JOY AWAY FROM ME.
    – Tim Stone
    May 23, 2014 at 10:46
  • "Unicorns came from everywhere and swept the question off into duplicate land so fast I was left breathless!" Strange; I thought Mjollnir would summon clouds and lightning, not unicorns.
    – Karl Knechtel
    Aug 5 at 4:47

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The previous question that I know was asked about this exact topic must have been deleted, so I will paraphrase my comment to that question here (and expand on it)....

Ultimately, meta sites are unique. They have required tags, which no main site (to the best of my knowledge) has. This gives a unique opportunity for heavy participants to earn tag badges on questions that impact a significant percentage of questions.

So in that respect, a gold tag badge in one or more of the 4 require tags gives a user significant duplicate close power in many questions on meta. On a main site, I would be concerned with someone wielding this much power, but on Meta.SE you have a special situation.

  • First, a majority of the high rep users (who could have a gold tag badge) are very experienced in Stack Exchange, and very experienced on meta, and thus are familiar with the particularities of meta.

  • Second, many of these same users are moderators on one or more sites, so they have experience with a binding close vote.

Given both points, I would trust the few users who could wield this power on meta (including yourself) to make the correct judgement on posts, and in the rare cases where they might be wrong, I would trust them to use the same power to reopen the question.

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