Reopener (Edit) Badge Idea

Question

When a Question gets closed and someone edits them to get them reopened, that should count towards a (bronze/silver/gold) badge.

I'm unsure if the OP of a question should count here as well, otherwise this could be gamed (write a bad question, wait it to be closed, edit it, have it reopened. Receive badge) otoh: After the process there is a good question.

To prevent people from waiting until its closed before they do their edit, this should maybe kick in after 3 close votes and a subsequent not-beeing-closed.

I think a bronze badge should be awarded for the first time ("First Aid"), a silver one ("Medic") at 100 and a gold one ("Saviour" or "MD") at 500 edits that led to reopening.

If multiple people edited a question before it gets reopened they all should receive this.

Just editing the tags should not count.

The Idea here is that people should be rewarded for not just "taking the trash out" by voting to close, but to try to aid the question if at all possible.

Answer 1

This is an excellent idea. In fact this related badge proposal for editing and answering already prompted me to propose the exact same thing (but I'm glad someone else did it when I was too lazy), since I initially thought that other proposal was aimed at the cases of reopening edits. But it turned out to be quite differently motivated and I think your idea is a very good alternative to it, even if probably of a rarer occurence, or maybe even orthogonal to that proposal. In fact the process of actually improving a closed (or about to close) question that might be salvagable could really deserve some more motivation apart from "just" improving the site and helping the users.

As to your particular points, the idea with kicking in as soon as there are 3 close votes isn't too bad to fight gaming the system. But I don't think gaming the system is too big of a problem in general here, since closing is quite a heavy action. So I don't think there would be many users really risking their question getting closed just for a badge if they already have a better version of the question up their sleeves anyway. So I think excluding the OP would be quite counterproductive, because the original asker improving his question in order for it to get reopened is even better than the community doing it for him.

The only possible (and unfortunately pretty easy) way to game the system might be for other users to just "jump on the train" with a minor edit once the major probably reopening edit was already made. While even minor edits can of course still be improving, I'm not sure they're badge-worthy when someone else has already salvaged the question for them. But I'm not sure how much this is a problem and I know that the signficance of an edit is hard (if not impossible) to assess.

I'm also not sure about the specific numbers for the badges and they might be a bit high, given that you need a closed/closable question that is salvagable to start with (maybe make gold 100 and silver 25). But then again this probably comes down to the difference between large sites and small sites, I guess.