33

A lot of badges have a bronze-silver-gold progression. For example:

  1. Nice Question - Question score of 10 or more - Bronze
  2. Good Question - Question score of 25 or more - Silver
  3. Great Question - Question score of 100 or more - Gold

Some badges, though, only have bronze-silver:

  1. Excavator - Edit first post that was inactive for 6 months - Bronze
  2. Archaeologist - Edit 100 posts that were inactive for 6 months - Silver

Still others only have silver-gold:

  1. Favorite Question - Question favorited by 25 users - Silver
  2. Stellar Question - Question favorited by 100 users - Gold

Why is this? I suppose I can understand why some groups might only have bronze and silver - maybe no amount of editing old posts should be worth a gold badge. But why isn't there a bronze version of "Favorite Question" for, say, 5 favorites?

12
  • 21
    Not directly related, but I seriously doubt anyone is using "favorite" to actually mark they favorite questions (in positive sense). Jun 28, 2016 at 0:24
  • 41
    "Save" might be a better term for what "favorite" does. Jun 28, 2016 at 1:24
  • @WilliamKunkel meta.stackexchange.com/a/92420/145495
    – Knu
    Jun 28, 2016 at 3:00
  • 20
    @AlexeiLevenkov I favorite good questions that I may want to find later, as well as crap questions that I want to check up on later.
    – Blorgbeard
    Jun 28, 2016 at 3:43
  • 9
    I think 10.000 edits is a good number to reach for the Archeologist gold badge.
    – tektiv
    Jun 28, 2016 at 7:45
  • @AlexeiLevenkov Yes I do. Shouldn't I?
    – dryairship
    Jun 29, 2016 at 12:01
  • Do you want people doing 10,000 edits just to get a gold badge, I would write a script if I really wanted the badge. Jun 29, 2016 at 20:21
  • 1
    @IanRingrose If you wrote a script that simply spellchecked and did inline code-formatting of common idioms, that'd be a net win for the community! :-)
    – jpaugh
    Jun 29, 2016 at 22:34
  • 2
    @jpaugh, It will put lot of questions on the front page for no good reason. Jun 30, 2016 at 8:44
  • 1
    Oh, I do favourite the ones I keep reposting as explanations of why you don't want to do a particular thing.
    – Sobrique
    Jun 30, 2016 at 8:59
  • See also “Needs More Sportsmanship” regarding absent gold badges…
    – Holger
    Jun 30, 2016 at 9:07
  • @tektiv You might want to write that number out so that you don't get Western devs taking you literally and making the gold badge achieved at 10 edits. But ha ha, nice one... 10,000 edits is ridiculous. 1,000 would be very high, considering the other half of the criteria (must be older than 6 months)
    – TylerH
    Jun 30, 2016 at 11:53

1 Answer 1

28

Most of my Favorites are questions I consider canonical, or near enough. It helps me find them when I want to mark new questions as duplicates of them. But I also use Favorites to keep track of questions temporarily, for whatever reason. The first usage makes the silver and gold badges worthwhile, but the second usage would make a bronze badge meaningless.

As for badges with bronze and silver variants only, there just isn't enough pressure yet for creating the gold. Archaeologist, for example, has only been awarded 1300 times as of today, and Research Assistant, 242 times. Even those who already have the silver badge have difficulty imagining ever reaching a hypothetical gold level.

4
  • 2
    I'm pretty sure this user would get a gold badge for tag wiki edits.
    – Artjom B.
    Jun 28, 2016 at 20:58
  • 1
    As one of the 1291 uses with an Archeologist badge, I don't agree that "reaching a hypothetical gold level" would be difficult to imagine. Look at the current gold & silver badges for "normal" editing: Strunk & White takes 80 edits (20 less than Archeologist), but Copy Editor takes 500 and still has been awarded to over 2k users. Some of those have < 1k reputation. If there were a Super Archeologist badge, one could still obtain it by actively hunting old posts that need fixing. Jun 29, 2016 at 12:15
  • 2
    @user2428118 there is significant initiative to make 500 relatively valid edits to gain 2K rep points, so 500 is very common but I would expect (not really verified) that there is significant drop off in number of edits after that. So 1000 could be good number for really dedicated editor. Jun 29, 2016 at 17:41
  • In my opinion it is too easy to get the fantastic gold badge. I crossed the 1k consecutive 2 month ago.
    – rekire
    Jun 29, 2016 at 19:56

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