Idle question: "Generalist" was one of the badges that nobody had, and now suddenly a whole bunch of us were awarded it. Was there some hidden time-related condition on it that the site met? Or did someone merge a bunch of tags?
2 Answers
The engine only starts awarding Generalist badges once the top 40 tags have at least 200 questions each. Reg tagged and re-tagged a lot of stuff this morning. Thanks, Reg.
-
2More like the last two weeks. And still work in progress. In fact, in two tags we've fallen below the threshold again (some old stuff got deleted). Oct 22, 2012 at 14:18
-
Ah! The "minimum number of questions" part is what I was wondering. Thanks, Kit & Reg!– MarthaªOct 22, 2012 at 14:22
-
@RegDwighт It does appear that gaining badges works both ways. I still have the Notification "You've gained the Meaning badge" but it no longer appears in my profile.
:-(– Andrew Leach ModOct 26, 2012 at 6:20 -
@Andrew: Tag badges, as opposed to other badges, can be revoked — for no other reason that tags themselves can go the way of the dodo. However, since the "meaning" tag is still around, soon enough you'll qualify for that badge again and will get it back. Oct 26, 2012 at 10:07
Also see the data.stackexchange query “Is the site ready for the Generalist Badge?”. It shows question counts for the top 40 tags on a site. The database the numbers are drawn from is updated monthly. The last few lines of the already-obsolete present view are shown below.
Tagname Uses Questions Needed with this Tag...
adverbs 269 -69
history 232 -32
tense 222 -22
word-order 210 -10
articles 190 10
writing 174 26
capitalization 169 31
possessive 159 41
antonyms 157 43
abbreviations 157 43
conjunctions 153 47
sentence 148 52
answered Oct 31, 2012 at 15:49
