What should we do with the Organizer badge?

Question

Update: This question was asked due to the employee comment quoted below, but the employee was incorrect. The badge is in fact awarded for tag edits that also modify the body or title. As such, most of this question is irrelevant.

The Organizer badge, awarded for editing the tags of a question, was originally introduced in response to an old, now-removed privilege that allowed 500+ rep users to "retag" questions. This was during a time without suggested edits, and later on when suggested edits were introduced, such users could still make such edits without having to suggest the edit and have it approved.

Today, the badge continues to be awarded, but only for making tag-only edits. As the word "retag" is no longer used anywhere in the software except in the description of the badge, I filed a request to have the description changed. animuson's comment on that request summarizes the issue with this badge perfectly:

[The Organizer badge] is only awarded on a tag-only edit. With the [retag] privilege gone, this is just a really dumb badge that does exactly the same thing as Editor just with an additional restriction. Like the retag privilege itself, it no longer serves any purpose. We shouldn't be encouraging users to only edit the tags when on the edit screen.

Based on this, what should be done to the Organizer badge? Should it be redefined to also include edits that not only edit tags but also possibly edit the title or body? Should the badge be removed?

One impediment to removing the badge is that it's one of 20 "triple-star" badges that count towards moderator candidate scores in elections. If the outcome is to remove the badge, what should be put in its place? (If that last question makes this discussion too broad, comment, and I'll remove it.)

Answer 1

The badge is fine as it is. All of the editing badges - Editor, Strunk & White, Copy Editor, Explainer, Refiner, Illuminator - ignore tag edits. You can make a million tag edits to other's posts and not earn a single one of them.

Retagging is still a very important activity though... Just not for the same reasons that editing titles and bodies is important. Although the UI is the same, they serve rather different purposes.

Right now, Organizer dovetails pretty well with Editor - if your first edit alters both the tags and body (or title) of someone else's question, you can earn both badges at the same time!

The problem is, we don't have any further badges in that progression. Organizer is a good "introduce the feature" badge, but there's nothing encouraging you to, say, go edit tags on 70 badly-tagged questions.

That may be ok; as important as tagging is, it's also easy to abuse relative to other forms of editing. But if we did want to make a change here, something aimed at encouraging useful tagging beyond the first edit would be worth thinking about.

Answer 2

I would suggest retiring the badge and replacing it with a badge to encourage more voting, especially downvoting (as this ties much better to the type of activity we wish a ♦ moderator to be good at than upvoting does). Possibilities are Critic, Suffrage, or Vox Populi. The last is probably the best, as it is also the hardest and requires the most knowledge of the system (not saying much for a bronze, but still).

Compared to Organizer (1.2k on MSE, 112.1k on SO), the number of awards for Suffrage (940 on MSE, 44.3k on SO) and especially Vox Populi (540 on MSE, 28.8k on SO) seem like a decent balance, being a little more selective but not ridiculously so. Critic (8.4k on MSE, 341.4k on SO) is unfortunately probably too broadly available to be of any use in distinguishing mediocre candidates from good ones.

Most of the other candidate badges suffer one or more of these problems:

• they are not bronze (not a dealbreaker, but a bit annoying)
• they have more difficult badges in the same family that are already included in the score (and making it trivially easier to get a higher score is not a useful thing to do)
• they encourage behavior that has nothing to do with moderation (e.g. asking, answering, chatting, commenting)
• they are too hard to get on many sites to be relevant (e.g. Generalist)
• they are too easy to get, so even those who would be poor candidates usually have them, inflating the score
• they are already otherwise represented adequately in the existing mix (such as the bounty starter/awarder badges; only Investor is really a suitable inclusion).

Answer 3

Correctly tagging questions is important for discoverability, especially on larger sites^{[citation needed]}. From personal experience, I see a lot of crap questions survive on Stack Overflow if they aren't tagged with the popular ones like [c#], [java], [python] etc.; conversely, I've asked a few duplicates on Meta Stack Exchange because I couldn't find the original even by browsing through tags. In my opinion, editing tags is important enough to get introduced to as a new user, so a bronze badge is appropriate for this and I suggest to keep it.

Should it be redefined to also include edits that not only edit tags but also possibly edit the title or body?

Yes, that makes perfectly sense. In fact, even though I have 130 of them I thought the badge worked exactly that way.