Why are accepted answers not included in the tag badge calculation?

Question

For the 400 votes tag badge, does it take into consideration answers marked as the accepted answer? The description indicates it does not.

I would think an accepted answer would be worth more, or at least the same amount, towards getting a tag badge than just a simple upvote? Lots of users mark answers as accepted and do not bother giving an upvote since the 15 points is like and upvote and a tip.

So it's possible for a user to have 400 accepted answers with no upvotes and not get a badge where a user with 400 answers (which could be right or wrong) with a single upvote and no accepted answers ever would get the badge. Just seems a little odd or does accounting for accepted answers make the badge calculation too complicated / slow?

Edit: Questions you ask and submit an answer to shouldn't be counted towards the total for accepted answers.

Edit: It just seems to me that the most important thing in the system is an accepted answer yet there are no badges for achieving more than one accepted answer. If up votes were more important, and therefore far more worthy of a badge, then why do the top voted answers not appear above the accepted answer? When it come to badges, accepted answers are second class citizens as compared to a possibly random upvote.

I have seen many upvotes on completely wrong answers but rarely do I see an accepted answer that was completely wrong.

Answer 1

Another reason why accepted answers shouldn't be counted for tag badge totals is because users have the ability to give them to themselves. You can accept your own answers, but you can't upvote your own answers, so counting accepted answers for the tag badge totals opens up an avenue for people to game the system.

Answer 2

Sorry about answering an old question - better than duplicating!

As the long-tail of questions spreads into more and more tags there are lots of tag areas with little traffic and even fewer upvotes - so if you want to get a badge (rather than some rep) in a large number of tags it is very difficult with the current voting structure.

One badge I've been trying to work towards is the 'Umbraco' badge - which currently has 1,421 questions, but doesn't attract an awful lot of votes. And so only has three people with the 100 upvote 'bronze' badge. 80% of questions asked with this tag have an accepted answer but more than 50% of answers have no upvotes. Surely after nearly 1,500 questions only three badges awarded suggests that the algorithm needs a tweak?

Also there seem to be fewer upvotes generally (I know its been mentioned elsewhere) - but of my 42 accepted answers up to December 2011 only 7 (17%) have no upvotes - in the last 18 months 8 of 21 accepted answers (38%) have no upvotes.

So to balance the decline in upvotes I think an accepted answer should count as a tag credit - as long as you are not answering your own question. I also think that new users should be able to upvite immediately - even if it confers no reputation until they reach a certain reputation themselves.

Answer 3

I actually fail to see why. The sole purpose of the tag scope is to measure a person's contribution to the tag.

• Both accepts and upvotes mark the answer as "useful" for another person -- and "usefulness to other people" is the main (if not the sole) criterion by which SE's system awards reputation points (thus measures a user's contribution)
  • in fact, acceptance even more so: it marks the answer as "the most helpful and useful" rather than just "helpful"
  • So they both mean that the answer is a useful contribution to the site -- and, transitively, -- to the tag
• They are both equally personal and subjective
  • So are both equally prone to marking an "incorrect" answer, being misguided and such
  • Yes, aggregate votes show community consensus, but each individual vote is a personal opinion. Acceptance is the same personal opinion, just expressed by another mechanic.
    • E.g. would you think that votes by the OP shouldn't count if there was no separate acceptable mechanic?

To add insult to injury, the system currently happily counts an upvote by an OP. Which both disproves those who claim that the current design's intention is to disqualify OPs from judging answers to their questions, and unfairly discriminates those answering questions by novices (something that the system designers explicitly claim to actively encourage).

• (Others suggest that the discrimination also hits answers in unpopular tags. So, in addition to being bad on its own, it also exacerbates the problem of creating tag synonyms since those tags have few users eligible for voting to begin with.)

Answer 4

Accepted answer != correct answer.

This may have changed somewhat due to the new 15-minute minimum time imposed on acceptances, but before that, it was very common for people to just accept the first answer that was posted, often within seconds (apparently without even reading it).

So no, I wouldn't say that acceptances are worth more than upvotes. Upvotes have been given by the community; acceptances are only given by the person who asked the question. And although it is possible to get specialist badges simply by answering hundreds upon hundreds of questions and getting a bunch of single-serve accept/upvote combos from the question starters, I think the badge is really meant to be for giving consistently good answers as determined by multiple upvotes.

Answer 5

I'm going to steal my answer from another question:

I don't think accepted answers should contribute to tag badge counting. Having an accepted answer only means the OP thinks your answer will work for what s/he is doing, and the OP has a vested interest in getting an answer that works for him/her. What truly counts, IMO, is the people who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the question, the people who simply think the answer is clear, concise, and correct.

EDIT: Response to this:

So it's possible for a user to have 400 accepted answers with no upvotes and not get a badge where a user with 400 answers with a single upvote and no accepted answers ever would get the badge.

Yes, it is possible, but it is extremely unlikely. Further more, the reward would be that the person with 400 accepted answers would get 2000 more rep than the person with 400 upvotes and no accepted answers.