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emanresu A
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The question count threshold should be halved

Unlike most SE sites, questions generally take significantly more effort to create than answers, which is the reason for these badges' creation. While the average score for answers on this site is 6.5, the average question score is 8.8, going up to 10.0 when closed and/or negative score questions are excluded.

The current suggested thresholds of 100/400/1000 score for 20/80/200 questions require an average of 5 votes per question. This is fine for answers, but from the above, the average asker would have a score of roughly 200 in a tag by the time they achieved the requisite 20 questions (probably higher for most established askers, feel free to look through GPR's query for an idea of how tag scores and question counts tend to correspond).

Since post score is a reasonable measure of overall effort, I think it's worth leaving the score requirements the same, but halving the question count requirement to 10/40/100 questions for bronze/silver/gold. Question tag badges should represent roughly the same amount of effort as the existing answer tag badges of the same type, and to demonstrate with statistics:

  • For answer tag badges, we currently have 698 bronze, 87 silver and 19 gold badges awarded.
  • With the current suggested thresholds, we would award 331 bronze, 30 silver and 7 gold question tag badges.
  • With the halved question count, we would award 676 bronze, 85 silver and 17 gold question tag badges, which is startlingly close to our existing counts for answers, meaning that question tag badges under this system would be about as significant as our existing answer tag badges.
emanresu A
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